PLEASE READ EVERYONE! - Software people are using

[Hifi Banjo Strings]

I use Ableton Live and Audacity but am far more confident in answering stuff about the latter - still very new to the former.

[[MMM]]

[MMM]: Cubase 5 (and Audacity for convertion if necessary)

[leespoons]

I've just added my name to the first post for Acid and Reaper.

[Bynar]

Adobe Audition 3.x and above is my weapon of choice.

[Qubic]

I guess I gotta be different... I've been using Mackie Tracktion 3 since Dec 2007.

It was a good inexpensive product to start my mash-up production hobby, with the Tracktion 3 Ultimate Bundle costing only $275 USD. It included Native Instruments Kontact Player 2, IK Multimedia AmpliTude LE (guitar/bass amp and effects), IK Multimedia SampleTank 2 SE (with w/ 100 instrument sound sets), a set of LinPlug plug-ins (CronoX3 and Alpha 3 synthesizers, RM IV Drum Addiction drum machine with over 250 kits and 2,000 MIDI loops), Submersible Music DrumCore TK drum software (with over 2GB sound library), a lite version of Garritan Personal Orchestra (800MB orchestral instrument samples), over 1GB of Sonic Reality mutlitrack loops, and some fairly good VST plug-ins (such as Acuma Lab Final Mix and Mackie's DSR-1, Panner, Compressors, and Side Chain Compressor).

For the price, it was definitely a great value for someone just getting into mash-up/remix production as a hobby.

And as it turned out, Tracktion 3 was actually quite intuitive and easy to use, so it was quick to learn, and fairly quick to work with. Albeit, it is missing some of the fandangled new quantize, tempo detection, and tempo/time warp features of today's music studios, but I've managed to learn a lot over the past several years using this old workhorse software.

However, now that I have a new awesome laptop, I may have outgrown Tracktion 3... The last update for the software was Feb 2008, and there's no indication that they'll be developing a new version for Windows 7 and 64-bit computers.

So I guess it's time to evaluate music studio software and plunge some more coin into my hobby.

I've been playing around with the trial version of Ableton Live 8 (and reading the manual) for the last few days. I'm finding the Ableton Live interface a little unintuitive, somewhat tedious and occasionally frustrating to use. But the tempo detection and time warp/markers features are quite nice.

It's really too bad that Cubase requires a darn $30 USB dongle just to run the trial version. Based on the online videos and feedback from a couple of people I know (one of whom operates an actual recording studio), Cubase seems to have some similar workflow and clip manipulation features as Tracktion 3, so it might be a logical progression for me... but I can't be sure unless I actually try it out, which would mean coughing up $30 just to try it for 30 days.

Wish me luck with my evaluation process!

[Bogoss Bootlegs]

I use:

-Acid Pro 5
-Audition
-Audacity

[RockstarBruski]

list updated 2012-03-31

[DJ Firth]

Just got myself a shiny new mixcraft 6, so you can add me to that as well as mixcraft 5 if ya like

[sjoersje]

I use Virtual DJ to quickly test certain combinations and then go to Magix Samplitude to do the actual mixing

[Go2]

I'm another Ableton Live user.