Apple MainStage

G

ggrantly

Veteran
An adjacent thread is seeking a multitrack computer recording option. This might have been placed there but seemed like a hijack, so here goes.

Does anyone use Apple MainStage for anything? Seem like it would have some serious editing - creation power and if needed can record. Note, I've been an Apple guy for a couple generations, and typical of Apple, they seem to have created a different lexicon than I presently comprehend. MainStage seems to have some shared functionality with both Garageband and Logic but again, not quite sure where one stops or starts. Having said that, for $30, I'll probably buy it just to take a look around.

Anyone used any of the Apple Audio products for anything?

TIA,
Grant
 
MainStage is designed for performing music live, either by MIDI control or with audio inputs from instruments. The recording options really aren't very comprehensive, it's more just to have a record of a live performance. I am pretty sure it doesn't have editing tools built in for recording, it will just spit out files that you'll need to import into another program afterwards. I think you'd be better off with Reaper if you're looking for low cost of Logic if you want to use an Apple app.

Personally, I used to use MainStage a little but I've since switched to Ableton Live, both for performing and for recording.
 
Ya, look into what Ableton is doing these days. Really impressive, imo (and in the opinion of my son who's a composer):
https://www.ableton.com/en/live/

But it's more than $30 (though the six-month rental prices are pretty good). Maybe check out the free trial of Ableton Live and if you're not blown away, go with MainStage...
 
I did testing for an unnamed fruit company and while I am a dedicated user of the hardware they have some issues in the software for professionals area.

So if it fits your needs and you won't mind if it suddenly disappears or radically changes a couple of years from now go for it. Personally I get tired of having to learn new software instead of actually getting work done. But then I didn't grow up in the everything changes every year era so...

Reaper is stable, multi platform and free so that would be my first choice if I was starting now and just recording editing sound. Personally I use ProTools but I'm on a really old version because I have a lot of expensive hardware I would have to replace to update it. I am looking closely at how DaVinci Resolve develops, because that looks like it might be the thing to switch to if PT dies on me. I'm not doing a lot of $$$ shows now and I seriously doubt the cost of PT will make sense. Reaper is not really a good choice for me because almost everything I do is for picture and with no OMF support Reaper doesn't work for my needs. I have used it for some audio only projects and it's fine for that.

Also PT has been going through hard times pretty much since Avid bought them and started a war with Apple. Though maybe that is calming down. But I know people who worked at Digidesign and nobody was all that happy about Avids management. Which makes sense if you look at Avids history of really lousy customer support.

If it's rock stable field recording software I was looking for I would buy (did actually) Boom Recorder. It is the best and most stable recorder I know of.
 
Noiz said this:

"So if it fits your needs and you won't mind if it suddenly disappears or radically changes a couple of years from now go for it. Personally I get tired of having to learn new software instead of actually getting work done. But then I didn't grow up in the everything changes every year era so..."

^THIS^

Nothing, but nothing is more true. I used to have mostly love for Apple, but now it is more love-hate. More recently, say the last 5-10 years, they have pushed the rate of change in OS so hard that many app companies can't keep up with the updates. This creates havoc for users by forcing them to have multiple OS versions to boot from. I was just informed that my bookkeeping software Account Edge (MYOB) by Acclivity is so broken ("Old code" are their words) that they are abandoning the long running and probably best bookkeeping solution for the mac. No problem as long as you don't want to run Catalina. But they have a subscription solution, argh. I think Apple has and continues to build nice products, both hardware and software, but dang, I don't want the focus of my computer use to just trying to keep up. Sorry I hijacked my own thread.

I wasn't imaging Mainstahge so much as a recorder, though I guess it can. I had imagined it for creation small musical tracks or even sound effects, or possibly to record VO. The bundled instruments and rhythm tools is pretty large. I haven't really done much of these small creations, but it is intriguing what you might be able to assemble.

BTW, thanks all for the comments.
 
Noiz2 said:
Reaper is stable, multi platform and free so that would be my first choice if I was starting now and just recording editing sound.... [but] Reaper is not really a good choice for me because almost everything I do is for picture and with no OMF support Reaper doesn't work for my needs. I have used it for some audio only projects and it's fine for that.
Click to expand...

Scott, Phil Perkins (whom you probably know... he lives a few block from me) is using Reaper front-to-back. Location recording (of music performances, IIRC), music mixes, AND film mixes. Phil's a solid dude and been in the biz since the 70s maybe? Done plenty of time with tape, Pro Tools, and everything between and after. Perhaps that means he's really good at working around problems with crappy OMFs and AAFs. Not a diss to you, Scott... I know you earned those scars...but a heads up for others thinking of heading down the Reaper path. And I --think-- he uses AATranslator when needed https://www.aatranslator.com.au . Anyway, I thought his shift was pretty interesting.

Later!

Jim
 
The irony is, to continue the trip down the rabbit hole, that Apples big defense on price back in the day was that the hardware stayed functional for so much longer than a PC that it was actually cheaper. PC's were pretty much infinitely "upgradeable", but also required upgrades with just about every OS update. It was part of the deal, every other year or so you had to replace the motherboard, and about every year you had to replace something else. It was all pretty cheap but I spent a lot of time upgrading and then troubleshooting the new hardware. But once everything was working it was very stable. Mac at the time let you install the latest OS on pretty much any Mac they had ever made. Upgrading was pretty limited so on an old box it might be slow but it worked. A draw back was that running "challenging" apps like ProTools often made the system unstable. At that time (creaky old age... 1990's) my windows box at home running equivalent software was a rock and the Mac at work crashed at least once a day. They both migrated to more modern underpinnings for their OS's (in the 90 Windows was just a shell running on DOS). Windows had a rough transition with a bunch of crash prone OS's and the Mac whent to Unix (OSX is a shell for a Unix OS) and became almost crash proof. Apps still crash but I haven't had the Mac OS crash in? 15 years or more. From what I hear Windows is about as stable now also. But while PC's are, or can be, very upgradable Mac has gone the other way and made almost any upgrade imposible, while also orphaning stuff at an alarming rate. I just picked up a very cheap Win. box so I can run some firmware updaters that only run under Win. (the box was cheaper than buying parallels...). And I can't say I miss the over cluttered 15 prompts to get anything done. But it is not as butt ugly as it used to be so there is that. Or to put it as a friend did "they may both be ladies of the evening, but one dresses like a call girl and the other like a street walker.".

BTW my solution to the PT issue was to just freeze that system in time. I have a second G5 in a box incase the CPU blows up and I figure I won't be using PT by the time they are both dead. A plus? of being more senior. I had gone through a bunch of software samplers (samplers are a great tool for SFX work) after each was orphaned. And decided to stop torturing myself. Top of the line E4's were going for basically scrap prices so I picked one up and upgraded the HD and dug out my old SCSI ZIP drive. It's kind of a boat anchor but it's a rock of stability and I haven't had to learn a new sampler in the last 20 years or so. That solution is not going to work for folks who are doing big instrumental stuff but for SFX the limited memory and storage is not really a problem and the E4 pitches very smoothly.

OK back to your regularly scheduled programing...
 
Yep I know Phil, worked with him at least once. I used to around the corner so to speak till we decided to take a walkabout to Detroit.
Good points, and no offense taken. I forgot about AAtranslator. Partly because I'm all Mac based (though as you may read above I now have a Win. box to play with) and AATranslator is Windows only.
So Reaper on Windows with AATranslator will get you "post ready". Phil is (or was) mostly a location sound guy, though with music videos probably more? So Reaper would be more usable right out of the box.

Also for low/no budget shows where the picture edit is completely finished before sound post starts OMF etc doesn't really matter. And with inexperienced editors if you do not hand hold them early on they are not going to be able to send you change notes anyway, or know how to send an OMF. So probably for most people on this list lack of OMF is not a big deal.

In a lot of what I have worked on being able to import an OMF and get change notes and revised OMF's has been kind of critical to not spending days or weeks recreating tracks.

Along those same lines ProTools was pretty much an essential skill to get employed in post film work. Well FX anyway, there used to be some variance with dialog and Foley editing, but almost all of those competing apps have disappeared.
I don't know if PT will remain the dominant DAW for post in the US (outside the US PT didn't become king because of the large price tag of a Mac computer ($$ in the first place but also $$$ import tariffs in many places) which was required during the time PT "took over" the market).

Having used a number of DAWs, the core principals are the same so learning one will start you off ahead of the game with a new one BUT it still takes a bunch of time to get fast with a new DAW and if you want to get hired you better be fast. I lost a job once (it was a lousy job but I needed rent) because while very fast on PT the with out warning gave me a "speed test". The catch was they put me on a box running the light version with short cut turned off and a one button mouse. So yah slow. Turns out they made everyone work on these crippled systems and then just expected them to go crazy cranking stuff out.
Point is part of the decision should be about looking forward. If you want to work features talk to folks working them and learn the software they will want you to use. If you don't have to worry about having to be compatible and you are always on your own system then the options are plenty.

My Reaper AATranslator worry for post where you have to exchange files with others is that at least one step is on an often incompatible OS. I'm not sure right now what the compatibility statis is, it has in the past ranged from pretty good to really terrible. Any vintage sound files for instance will get trashed passing through Windows. Now these are really out dated files even on a Mac but the Mac file system doesn't destroy them and you can still import them into many/ most DAWs. Can be an issue with folks who have large libraries that have been building for a long time. It's possible that current Windows file system plays nicer but I doubt it since there would be hardly any incentive to do so. Also it is fairly common practice to exchange ProTools sessions in post and that would be really problematic translating back and forth with Reaper. Even PT to PT can have compatibility issues but I doubt you would get much more than what you get in an OMF with a Reaper to PT session pass through AATranslator.

So for my particular situation it looked like a not very likely to work well solution. I know I will be sending and receiving PT sessions. I know I will be getting some old sound designer 2 files. And with almost no exceptions I know I will be exchanging with Mac only eco systems.

but those are conditions that are pretty specific to me.

BTW I have a slew of DAWs and sound utilities along with a bunch of video utilities. Almost all of them I have just so I can accept whatever output I am given and transform it to something I can use. So in a pich I can open a Reaper project save it as an EDL, open the EDL in Resolve and export an OMF for PT.
 
Phil does a whole bunch of post. We've chatted about this in person, but rather than me misremembering, let me quote something he wrote about 18-months ago:

"[With Reaper] I'm at least 8 doc features, 2 full TV series, 2 full seasons of a science podcast, 6+music albums and innumerable shorts and small sound design projects (including some immersive stuff) down the road with it now, in addition to using it for some location music recording. Works for me."

So that's cool.

But back to the OP's query, check out the various flavors of Ableton and see if you're tempted. ;-)
 
Noiz2 said:
Also it is fairly common practice to exchange ProTools sessions in post and that would be really problematic translating back and forth with Reaper. Even PT to PT can have compatibility issues but I doubt you would get much more than what you get in an OMF with a Reaper to PT session pass through AATranslator.
Click to expand...
IMO OMF really is not much better than using stems but with much more potential drama. It would be my suggestion that for the best results I would use AATranslator to convert directly from a ProTools session file (PTX or PTF, etc) to Reaper and then, again using AATranslator, convert directly back to a PTX.
 
Runaway said:
IMO OMF really is not much better than using stems but with much more potential drama. It would be my suggestion that for the best results I would use AATranslator to convert directly from a ProTools session file (PTX or PTF, etc) to Reaper and then, again using AATranslator, convert directly back to a PTX.
Click to expand...

Well STEMS don't offer a way to exchange while editing. OMF is a VERY different beast with MUCH more flexibility. Maybe you are using the term STEM incorrectly?

STEMS are the mixes of the basic types made during the final mix. So a mix of dialog only, a mix of ADR only a mix of SFX only etc. If they are all played at unity you get the final mix. Very useful for making adjustments down the road or making versions. Since each group is one full length file with no automation they are pretty useless to pass between editors.
An OMF on the other hand is an exchangeable version of your session. All the clips are where they should be and the names are meaningful. The track assignments are still there and pan and volume automation stay intact. So OMF is a viable way to pass a project off for further editing where STEMS is not.

Not to mention that the file sizes are often much larger with STEMS since all tracks are full length, but that can vary wildly with different projects. 200+ tracks of sound are probably going to be a bigger hand off than STEMS of the same project, but on a relatively simple low budget project the STEMS may be many times the size of the OMF.

OMF is old and has some limitations which is why in post one will, if you can, pass off the PT session instead.

Even for versions STEMS are only really useful if you also have access to the full session files of anything you need to change. For instance if you are dubbing to another language you are going to replace the dialog & ADR track and possible any BG walla. While you can toss the ADR STEM you will need the dialog session to pull the non dialog parts over to fill out the dubbed track, or budget a bunch for new FOLEY. Same with BG's. If you can't just replace the bits where there is English spoke you will need to recreate the entire mix.

The use of STEMS is to be able to streamline things like doing TV versions where you are just compressing the dialog and doing mix downs to stereo and Dolby Surround from a Dolby Digital mix. For that they are big time savers.

And of course you can't do STEMS till you do the final mix (by definition) so again pretty useless for editors.
 
Noiz2 said:
An OMF on the other hand is an exchangeable version of your session. All the clips are where they should be and the names are meaningful. The track assignments are still there and pan and volume automation stay intact. So OMF is a viable way to pass a project off for further editing where STEMS is not.
Click to expand...
Thanks for that lesson on stems but I actually do know what a stem is and I have experience with almost every OMF from pretty much every DAW/NLE and no they are not all created equal. You are correct in that the clips are where they should be and possibly track names but no after that you do not always get pan and volume automation nor even meaningful names and sometimes one DAW/NLE won't read an OMF from another DAW/NLE.
No I'm not advocating stems and I'm certainly not advocating OMF but I would suggest that unless you know for a fact that the DAW/NLE receiving your OMF (and believe it or not not every DAW/NLE can open an OMF let alone every OMF variant) can in fact read "All the clips are where they should be and the names are meaningful. The track assignments are still there and pan and volume automation stay intact" then stems might be an option.
 
Jim Feeley said:
Phil does a whole bunch of post. We've chatted about this in person, but rather than me misremembering, let me quote something he wrote about 18-months ago:

"[With Reaper] I'm at least 8 doc features, 2 full TV series, 2 full seasons of a science podcast, 6+music albums and innumerable shorts and small sound design projects (including some immersive stuff) down the road with it now, in addition to using it for some location music recording. Works for me."

So that's cool.

But back to the OP's query, check out the various flavors of Ableton and see if you're tempted. ;-)
Click to expand...

I'm going to hopefully put this in a way that comes out right. I have done a lot of work kind of like Phil has done. I haven't seen him in a bunch of years so I went on IMDB to check and I went down the last five to ten features and there are no other credits for sound. This is not at all unusual with documentary work and as I said if you don't have to work with others your choices are very flexible.

I don't have an issue with Reaper, what I was pointing out is that you will probably get in trouble if you have to work with a team. If you are working on projects with total budgets under $100,000 odds are high that you are the sound post "team" so not an issue. If you are doing TV (just about everything but big budget narratives) again you are probably handing it off to yourself.

If on the other hand you are working on even small budget feature narrative films you will have a sound post crew. You need to be able to transfer sessions back and forth. If you are working on ads other than purely local ones you will almost never be doing the mix so you need to be able to send the mix house a file. That is almost always either an OMF or a PT session. They do not want your mix or stems because they are going to be mixing with a bunch of attention deficit "ad people" and some company rep and they will need to make changes at a per sound level. You will also probably be on call to provide those swap in sounds. If you have to bounce out a full length track that they get to lay in and then trim out the dead space from, you are not going to get a lot of return work.

Phil is great but he is working in the parts of the industry that you can get away with out having to do a lot of project transfers. Heck he has about 4X the credits I do and he works all the time. So I completely believe him that he is having no problems with Reaper. If that is the kind of work you are doing then Reaper might be a good choice for you also.
It is also fairly location dependant. The Bay Area is a bit of a mecca to documentary filmmakers who actually have some budget for sound. Detroit is not such a place. There are few docs in general and nobody is budgeting for sound post. Phil could not make a living doing what he is doing in a lot of places outside of the Bay Area, LA maybe, or NYC. Even when I was in the Bay Area OMF was a must of getting the rough edit from the picture editor into PT. Reaper with AATranslator would probably work acceptably for that. And in the doc and micro budget film zone time is usually less of a hammer hanging over your head than bigger budget projects and national ads so you have a bit more time to make something happen.

To be clear.
I am not knocking Phil, he does great work and was a pleasure to work with. Absolutely a consummate professional.
And I'm not knocking Reaper, probably the best bang for the buck in a DAW (even if you pay full price for it).

What I am saying is that you have to know what your needs will be before you can pick a DAW that will work for your particular needs.
I would personally love to dump PT but on top of being able to exchange sessions, I haven't found anything that, for me, does as much of what I need as PT does. I have eight DAWs installed (if you count Resolve). I use PT 90% of the time because I know it and I am fast on it. And I use it about 5% because I need the exchangeability, ot some plugin that doesn't work with others. The others ranging from supper low end like Garage Band (which has it's uses) to Reaper and MixBus, both of which are fine but more music than post oriended. The one that might actually replace PT is Resolve. And as I do less budgeted work and more OMB stuff Resolve and or Reaper will probably get more use. If Resolves library functions ever get close to Soundminers that would be a turning point for me but aint there yet.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top