Review: Presonus Studio One V3 first impression after upgrading 12 hours ago and their (in their own words) "Most EPIC" Webcast ever....

Presonus Studio One V3 is out.


Now everybody is over the shiny new shit. But if you put the arranger (which they sell as the brand new thing, lol. ) and multitouch support aside, there is not too much Epic about this release really.
I already found a lot of bullshit, and its only out since 12 hours or so.

And because I am what I am, I have to rant all over it.. :)

(Especially because of the braggin about the "Epicness" and the pretty steep upgrade price policy compared to other companies.)

Best new thing is the new look. Because it really looks great now. Why?
Well they took a good look at Logic again. Thats why. But the GUI options are
already the prime example to explain what is wrong with Presonus *all the time*.

Now you can change the look of the GUI, but in a typical presonus fashion
its implemented to be idiotproof for the 12 year old.
So you only have some sliders that you can mess around with.
Better than nothing, but nothing "Epic" or "Professional" about it.
They never go that extramile that could make a new implementation really great,
or better than their competitors.

This is true for basically everything "new" in V3. Nice, but gets old very, very fast
if you know where they stole it from and especially how lame and lazy its implemented.

Now I have to say that I like the release anyways, but I love to rant and
don't want to talk about the good little things. Thats me. Most of you know that. :)

So with V3, after you wipe away all the hype, the new look and the buzzwords,
there is still some shit going on. Like everywhere theese days in the DEVs department.
Presonus is not alone here.

Back to the topic:
Basically they copied a lot of stuff again from Logic.
A little bit from Tracktion and FL Studio and thats it. Nothing really new to it.
Well the guys originated from Steinberg, so stealing from others
is part of their gameplan. And so what? If its done well I have no problem with that.

(See Bitwig -> Ableton. Same problem. Idiots at Bitwig coud have SUNK
the Ableton boat, but the same halfass implementation of stuff, despite the
new code and framework and whatnot. I just CAN't WAIT to see the BW Fanboy-faces
when the new Ableton comes out. Lol)

Stealing from Logic is fine, because I love Logic, but Logic is getting soooo darn old.
But that should tell you something. Its still a major player and the Apple-A******* just give it a facelift now and then. With a facelift, I mean FACELIFT. Just new pretty pictures for compressor or shit. EXS looks the same since 10000 years, Audio Engine is the same shit like always and whatnot.
HOWEVER: Despite its age it's still one of the major players, also with the YOUNG Kids, (talk EDM here) now that should tell you something of the ingenious quality level Logic had at the time when it was still developed by Emagic. Nothing could touch it. And its still here, but slowly falling apart. Because of the Garage-Band-ization for the 12 year old...

Apropos for-the-12 year old, lets get back on topic:

So with all the shit that comes now, I have to admit I still give V3 a run and see where it goes.
Because from first feeling I like it more than Garogic  Band  "Pro" X and thats good enough for me for now. At least until Bitwigs v1.2 comes around..
Which might only be a couple of days, so what. :)
But they might f**k it up again also, so who knows...

And because I did a lot of the new stuff that will come out later this year
again exclusively in Renoise, looking at some nice GUIs from time to time
is a welcome distraction.

Anyways I am okay with the V3 upgrade and the V3 upgrade price.
But its just okay, nothing to get excited about. And I can see that some people
will be furious when the hype dust settles. Because for the upgrade price you can buy
full versions from other DAW developers.

The only, in their words: "Industry new" thing about the arranger is the scratchpad.
Well, arranger tracks are in logic and especially cubase since quite a while.
In Cubase its way more advanced then the Presonus Selling Department
wants you to believe, but thats another story go look for yourself
if you're into that kind of stuff.

And Reaper has Custom Actions for that stuff, that go waaaaay further my friends.
But agreed. Not so simple and dragndrop idiot proof for the 12 year old.

Also they really really missed the big hit with the half-assed implementation of
this Multi Instrument and Multi Fx try-to-be modular thing. But what else to expext?
They should have gone the extramile and go (at least semi) modular right away,
when they coded the framework for this.
Becaue THAT is the future. just look around what the others are doing.
(Who are selling their shit like crazy, you see?)

Presonus coulnd't even be bothered to implement Mid/Side. Lol.

And again: This is TYPICAL for the implementation-mentality of Presonus.

Because in this state you *have* to compare it to Tracktion and FL Studios "Patchers"
at some point and then it is not that great anymore.  In fact its just shiny bullshit.
Get yourself Blue Cats Patchwork or the MB7 mixer for 30 bucks or something
in that neighbourhood, you can do more with that. And use it in every DAW you want.

Image Line has released a modular Host plugin that is FREE for christs sake and can do the same shit. (Google: Image Line Modular Host Beta)

Also: Theres still no dedicated Drumeditor/eventlist/hyperedit whatever.
Which is again something that really goes against the term "Professional"

Sampler: Still no crossfade for loop. No directional looping. Lol.
I said that 1000 times before:
Then you DO NOT NEED LOOPING AT ALL in a sampler.
In 2015. Come on guys. Go and get your shit together. But Presonus is not alone
in the Idiot Department on that one, Bitwig same shit.
Even worse, because BigWok is FOCUSED on electronic music in the first place.
Shame on you, BitWat.

Okay back to Presonus-wanna-be-Steinberg-so-shit-will-happen department:

EXS import is new as well and would have been cool *if* the sampler
would have been cool in the first place. Its no sampler at all my friends.
Calling this a sampler is plainly an offense.
Its a sample player, no sampler. The modulation targets are a joke, for such a
low number of modulation targets you do not need to steal the EXS modulation matrix.
And you have never an idea which sample you are playing.
Can't edit shit, no waveform display nuthing. Sooo. Yeah. Exs and Kontakt import.
WHY THE HELL WOULD I DARE IMPORTING  FROM KONTAKT
INTO SHIT LIKE THIS?!? Are you CRAZY?!

Maybe positive for you, but I couldnt care less:

- A Bitcrusher, yeeeah... Yawn...

-A lot of "new" content, so you get your 100000th upright bass and honky tonk
 in a over 15gb sample library and stuff like that.


On a side note: Also you have to understand that Studio One is in their own words "famous" for its DRAG N DROP workflow, which is excellent for the 12 year old but hooooorible for professionals. Nothing beats full keycommand action in terms of speed. Ever. Don't believe it? Talk to Reaper guys with custom actions. They are laughing at drag n drop workflow.

Every other Kid that is now all over it will probably visit the doctor regulary in a couple of years, because the "drag n drop awesomeness" turned their mousehand into shit..
(See my thread about ergonimic mouseoptions a post or two below this,
and when I started with music there was no Ableton,Bitwig,Studio One Dragndrop madness...)

We call that "Eliminate mouse-miles  wherever you can" over at the Renoise-Forum.
But Renoise is for grown-ups, nerds and smart guys, we do not want you drag-n-droppies there.. :D

Best,

tL.

Bitwig-Review: My kinda "Rant-Review" on the release day...

__________
Revision Sunday 30th of March 2014:

Mute regions inside of Clip:

Mute regions is actually possible. You have to open the Audio Event Inspector and press the "M" Button there. Well, not very convenient, but at least it's possible.

Same goes for fades, but actually I knew that fades where somehow possible, thats why I didnt include them in my "rant"

The Pencil-In-Bug is resolved. By the way, we are already 1.0.3, that means two updates in two days.
I hope they keep the pace so that we can actually see the full potential of the software quite soon.

But still more rant: It looks like there is no Midi-Out, even if they use VST as their standart and
there also is NO support for multitimbral instruments and also NO support for multi-outs! 

 That means "Hello Bitwig, goodbye Kontakt, Maschine and the likes../"

Have phun...


___________
Original post starts here:

Oh man. I was freaking out today when I actually got Bitwig in my hands.

The first hour or two were so awesome that I was blind to a lot (!) of things.

Then there came the first letdown. Then the next one. 

I ended up being kinda disappointed, because my expectations were so high. 

But hey, we are talking a 1.0 release, aren' t we?

So it's really a very nice piece of software we have here, however,

there are some things that are plainly disappointing.

Sooo...  this is what I wrote as a comment on youtube (Yeah, waaay too much, that's why I decided to put it in here as well....

We are talking version 1.0.2 here:

My 2ct: Very very nice peace of software, a lot of really good stuff in there already.

*however* , just to let some of you guys know,
so you don't get too much overhyped:


- No autosave. No project backups. You better use save-as from time to time.

- No Folders/Nested folders.

- No grouping function. (Neither clips, tracks or faders)

- Modular Stuff not implemented yet. So forget about that for a while as well.

- No previous/next sample buttons in the sampler or drum rack.

- No EXS Import. None. No import at all so far as I can see.

- No Rewire

- No Audio Units

- No Groovetemplates

- *No* input quantize?! Really? Must miss something.
   Tell me where it is please....

- Looks like there is no dedicated "hot swap" mode or something similar. 
 You need to delete stuff and add stuff again. Pretty time-consuming.

- For first timers: Good luck finding your device-presets.. :D

- Key-commands and general mouse behavior very strange sometimes.
  For example: Doubleclicking resets (!) value. alt-click (which is usually reset    everywhere else)  is for entering values.  

- Looks like no skinning of the basic look.
  The look that you see is what you get. Would be very sad indeed.

- Very limited (and really too funky colors)  to choose from for your clips    and/or tracks

- No keyboard shortcut to rename or right-click context menu to rename clips, only    tracks. You have to click the clip, go to the inspector and do it from there.

- No mute/solo keyboard shortcuts.

- No mute/solo of audio regions/audio events/any regions/events (!!)

- Double clicking on a loop/sample in the browser will do nothing btu play it.
   It wont create a new track and adds the loop/sample. .
  Dropping it right next to the browser also doesnt work.
  You have to drop it on the *left half* of your screen so that actually
  a new track gets created and the loop gets added. Whoa.

- In general operating BW requires a lot of mouse hovering and back-and-forth   over  the whole screen,  which is time-consuming and *very*  straining on your  mouse-hand (!!)

- (add to that) Very limited keyboard-commands. Oh man. Again.

- pg up/down doesn't work in the browser.
  Its locked to track selection... (Huh ???)
  So have fun grabbing those way too tiny scroll-bars.

- Metadata-Browser basically useless.
 (That was a real frustrating experience   for me in particular!) 
 Looks like you can't add your own tags can only choose from a very limited selection AND it works only for devices and  presets AND *NOT*  for  your  100GB sample library (which would make TONS of more sense theese days, i.e. look how ace cubase handles that.)

- Hitpoint detection sometimes waaaay off, when zoomed in.

- Looks like FX menu on rightclick includes only bigwig devices. you want your vst on right click? Seems like you have to pedal all to the right to the browser and get it there.

- Looks like no fast way to "pencil in" stuff in the piano roll. Double-Click galore all over the place. Not sure though,  (hopefully) might miss something here.

- Looks like we have a (to some users of another application) well known PDC    problem on the sends also, not really sure right now though, because on the first run I had (in a row): 

 1)  Hard Crashed on Soundtoys Echoboy Duplication on send (every time, so   bug,   despite "Sandbox"!) 
  2) Audio Engine Crash on PSP608 Multidelay on deleting that one from the     send.
  3) Audio Engine Crash on Nomad Factory Liquid Delays.

Oh, and I forgot to mention that Bitwig seems to be the first DAW where you (at least on OSX) can't drag n drop audio files from the finder into the application! Now, what the hell?!

Also the VST plug-in list is a HUUUGE MESS! So hopefully you do not have too many plugins like I have....


And at last: Parts of the manual are a joke.
For example, thats what is written in there about the sampler:

" Sampler: A sampler that can handle single or multiple samples (with a
  resizable mapping editor) and has a seven-mode filter and numerous
  modulation sources. "

That's it.Really. No sh*t. :)

But besides all of this. Honestly: I *STILL* believe, its a very nice 1.0 release
and a great upcoming software package.

But Ableton killer right out of the box?
(I expected that like a lot of other people as well)

Noooooo way :D
.
And if someone figures out how to *change* a freaking keycommand, please leave a comment here, because it looks like right now you *can not* :p


So happy (double) clicking, because believe me, you *will* click *a lot*. 

Cheers,

tL.