Recording - August 2010 - 14

PreSonus Studio One

hundreds of presets and samples, drum kits for Impact by Ueberschall, ToonTrack’s EZDrummer Lite, and Native Instruments’ Kore Player virtual instrument with a special content library.

when it’s unneeded or impractical to involve a mastering house. I haven’t yet assembled an entire album with the Project Page, but my initial tests have me looking forward to doing so.

Hands on In the first draft of this review, I spent way too much time gushing about how easy it was to get started in Studio One and how much fun it was. Let me break it down for you: on my first morning using the program, I configured my studio, composed a song for multiple virtual instruments and overdubbed/punched vocals and string parts, edited MIDI and audio, added automation, customized a mix with insert and send/return effects, and rendered the mixdown... all in under two Studio One Artist vs. Pro— hours and without a single glance at the comparing features manual. Everything from controller mapping to reassigning key commands to • Studio One Pro has the Project Page and everything in it, which includes Project MP3 import/export and export to SoundCloud. Studio One Artist has only the Song Page. • Studio One Pro offers a choice of 32-bit or 64-bit data architecture, whereas Artist is fixed at 32-bit. • Studio One Pro offers QuickTime video playback and sync, for users who want to work with sound for picture. Audio from imported video files can be extracted and placed on its own audio track, and video import is as simple as drag and drop. • Studio One Pro has a few more effects plugins than Artist, including Pipeline, a plug-in that lets you route audio out of your interface, through an external effects processor in the analog world, and back into Studio One. • Studio One Pro allows you to use VST2, VST3, and Audio Units plug-ins from third parties in addition to the built-in effects, and adds ReWire support for seamless routing of The Project Page, with per-Track effects chains and graphic crossfades shown. audio between Studio One and other applications.—MM Master effects chain applied to the Project as latency compensation worked seamlessly a whole. Note that if you’re working with and easily right from the get-go. and appealing. Others of us are intrigued by Studio One Songs, they will render upon Since then I’ve found my experience with the idea of a seamlessly integrated system for inclusion in the Project, and re-render behind Studio One Pro to be universally reward- tracking, mixing, and mastering our own music the scenes whenever you edit and save them ing—free of crashes and glitches, producing without having to add anything on. And a few on the Song Page, so your Project will always high-quality output without recourse to any of of us... maybe more than a few... have had one be up to date without having to re-import. my usual third-party plug-ins or instruments, crash, one fruitless hunt through nested function Once you have your playlist sounding and constantly filled with alternating menus, one unnecessary bloated upgrade too the way you’d like it to, you can burn a CD moments of “I wonder if it can do... yep, it many, and want something simple and greatdirectly, create a disc image and cue file can” and “Boy, that was easier than I sounding that just works. for later burning, or export your Project thought it would be”. There’s not a lot to add For those of us who fit those categories, into a folder of files for Internet upload. As to that assessment as of now... this is one Studio One makes a lot of sense, and downof version 1.5, Studio One Pro offers the slick and well-laid-out little DAW. loading the 30-day free demo available option of a direct upload to SoundCloud What doesn’t it have? Surround support, from the PreSonus website seems like a (www.soundcloud.com) for hosting and a notation editor, dedicated loop-based or good investment of our time. sharing your tracks. slice-based remixing features, a looper, a The Project Page won’t magically turn you vocoder, a convolution reverb, and proba- Prices: Studio One Pro, $399; Studio One into Bob Ludwig or Greg Calbi, but it provides bly fifty to a hundred other things I didn’t Artist, $199 (free with PreSonus interfaces) a solid set of seamlessly-integrated tools for really miss all that much. Your mileage More from: PreSonus, www.presonus.com. polishing and assembling your work in cases may vary. From Songs to Projects The Project Page is nothing less than a complete mastering and CD compositing suite built right into Studio One Pro. You can audition Songs and check their levels, dynamics, phase correlation, etc., and then assemble them into playlists with easilyadded crossfades. As you can see from the screenshot, the Songs in a Project (or whatever other audio files you care to include via drag-and-drop from the Browser) are shown on a graphic timeline, and each one has the option of an insert effects chain to get its audio exactly where you want it, with a
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RECORDING AUGUST 2010

And in the end... The elephant in the room, the unasked and unanswered question no one wants to touch, is “With all the software out there already, do we really need another DAW?” My response to that question is, “Well, who are ‘we’, really?” Some of us are established users of existing DAWs who love (or at least tolerate) them and are very used to working with them; Studio One isn’t a magic carpet to whisk us out of our comfort zone into a miraculously better place. Some of us have extremely specific needs that are met by one DAW and no other. Some of us require, above all else, file sharing capability with the studio down the street; if that’s the case, we use what they use, and no other DAW can really squeeze into that spot. But some of us are new to the world of DAWs and probably find the idea of a centralized and well-organized application with everything we need close at hand to be comforting

http://www.soundcloud.com

Recording - August 2010

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