Recording - August 2010 - 10

B Y M I K E M E T L AY

PreSonus

There’s a new DAW in the world—we take a closer look
audio loops, plug-in effects, automation data, MIDI data, and so forth. A Project is a set of Songs assembled into a final product—an album that can be burned to CD, or a collection of tracks that can be uploaded to the Internet or otherwise distributed digitally. So the Song Page provides all your tools for tracking and mixing, and the Project Page has tools for mastering and track assembly. This is the main difference between Studio One’s two versions—Artist doesn’t have the Project Page. Studio One makes much of the fact that everything you need to make a Song or Project is on a single Page. In practical use, this isn’t strictly true—as with other DAWs, virtual instruments and effects plug-ins appear as pop-up windows, and it’s possible to tear off sections of a Page (e.g. the mix Console) and have them appear in separate windows if you have the screen real estate to support it. But all that having been said, it’s actually quite remarkable how well the single-Page paradigm works for Studio One. The Song Page When you create a new Song, you’re offered a list of starter configurations—examples like Vocal + Guitar, Rock Band, Instrument Set (a preloaded set of virtual instruments), and a whole variety of pre-optimized layouts for all of PreSonus’s hardware interfaces from the FireStudio Mobile (reviewed July 2010) all the way up to the massive StudioLive digital console/interfaces (reviews forthcoming). When the Song Page opens, you’ll find mixer channels already laid out for you to get started. Within the real estate of the Song Page (See the screenshot above), you can cause various types of data to expand, collapse, or disappear entirely, depending on what you need to see at any given moment. In the screenshot, the Arrange and Console views are visible; you can see the Edit and Browser views in the shot on page 4. Arrange: The Arrange View is always present, showing audio and MIDI data in waveform and piano-roll format respectively, with overlaid curves for automation and MIDI control information. Each Track in the Arrange View can contain multiple layers of data if desired (alternate versions of a track, for example, with the same mix channel and effects), as well as multiple takes for each

Studio One

PreSonus, known up to now for its audio hardware, has released a new DAW called Studio One. It’s touted as a clean slate of sorts... a brand-new program with lots of useful features but no “bloat”, a refreshing alternative to the many over-updated and unwieldy DAWs out there. With many established DAW products fighting to keep their user communities and to lure users away from one another, how does this newcomer fare? Before you start Studio One comes in two versions: Artist and Pro. Studio One Artist is available as a standalone app and also comes bundled free with every hardware interface PreSonus sells. Studio One Pro is the full version of the program, sold on its own or as an upgrade to Artist. (See the sidebar on page 14 for details on the differences.) Studio One requires a Windows PC running XP, Vista, or 7, or a Mac running Mac OS X 10.5.2 or later. The minimum required hardware listed on the PreSonus website for both platforms represents what the state of the art was several years ago; any computer you can buy now, or have had lying around for a while, should run Studio One handily. You’ll
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RECORDING AUGUST 2010

need an Internet connection for authorization (your activation code will allow five installs) and downloading/installing new content beyond what’s on the DVDs. That said, Studio One does offer optimization for modern computers; it happily runs on multiple cores and can work with 32-bit or 64-bit data, so the computers of today and the next several years will bring out its best. My primary test machine was a MacBook 2 GHz machine with 2 GB of RAM running Mac OS X 10.6.2, which ran Studio One Pro version 1.5 with nary a complaint. Pages—Start, Song, and Project Studio One opens on the Start Page, which offers an overview of recent items you’ve worked on, links to online demos and tutorials, and a news feed for relevant bulletins on stuff like new content and upgrades. From here you can also alter the hardware configuration of your studio, setting up interfaces, controllers, and other external devices. Most often you’ll leave the Start page almost immediately, starting work on a new or existing Song or Project. In Studio One, a Song is just that—a song, with all its recorded audio, virtual instruments,

Recording - August 2010

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Recording - August 2010