WhichDAW if you've got a bunch of old 4-track analog masters

[jhampson]

Hey guys, I'm brand new to The Recording Project and I'm mainly here because I need advice on which DAW to use. I've got a ton of old 4-track masters that I need to digitize and get cleaned up, and then once that's done I would like to moveon and start recording new stuff - nothing mega-professional but good eno ugh to make the average Joe think it sounds professional.

I've been knocking around with a program called n-Track Studio, which is owned by a company called FA Soft. It's pretty good as far as I'm concerned, a couple glitches, but then I noticed the user manual was clearly written by people for whom English ain't their first language. I checked online and FA Soft's "office" is in Rome, Italy. Talk about losing confidence in a software product. Which is too bad, because I kind of like n-Track, but I don't see much chatter on the boards about n-Track, so I'm thinking it's not particularly popular. Would like to hear other people's thoughts on it, if they've used it.

And now to my main question: according to Wikipedia Cakewalk Sonar seems to be the standard DAW for Windows-based PC's and I was wondering if this might be the route to go for someone like me. The only problem is, about half of the Sonar product seems geared towards MIDI and half towards normal audio recording. I'm just not interested in MIDI - I don't want to fool with it, I just want to write and record music and do your traditional mixing and mastering of songs. Is Sonar worth it? Should I look at any other packages? Any advice from you guys who've worked with a lot of different packages would be helpful...thanks.

[M.Brane]

If all your doing is audio it makes very little difference which software you use as long as it's reasonably up-to-date i.e 32bit float or 48bit integer mix bus.

I bought a used Digi001 for $300. It cost me $40 to update to PTLE 6.4. It's got all the inputs I need, sounds decent, and works without issues. The factory plug-ins aren't bad either.

The editing capabilities are also way beyond anything I'll ever do, yet easy to learn the basics.

[seanmorse]

Agreed.

N-Track is fairly popular. It's got a decent feature set, though not the most user-friendly package I've seen. There are still some of us here that use it, last I'd heard. Definitely not a mainstream app though.

IMO, Sonar and Cubase are in the same ballpark, both price-wise and feature-wise (I'm a Cubase guy, myself). There are few DAWs these days without MIDI capabilities, so chances are you'll end up with something that has MIDI, even if you don't have any use for it.

ProTools is the indisputed industry standard. Everything about it seems proprietary and incredibly expensive, but if you look hard enough, you can probably find a used rig like M.Brane that'll do the trick. I had been anti Pro-Tools forever, but regretted it after ending up with a production gig at another studio with a Control 24 rig ...sometimes you never know.

[jhampson]

Thanks, guys, for the quick responses. This info helps me. In addition to n-Track I think I'll also check out Cubase SE or SL, as I'm hearing more people say it's pretty good.