Sound Design Software

Blade Borge

Blade Borge

Well-known member
I'm on a PC, need some flexible, professional sound design software, any advice?

Oh and assuming I switch to Mac one day, what's good there?
 
The Std. is Pro Tools for audio, but there are many others, Cubase, Audition, Vegas, Logic, Kore, Cakewalk, Performer, Nuendo, etc....take your pick. :)

I use Audition for film and Cubase for music and MIDI. It's the interface layout I like for the job at hand, but any will do. If I ran a Mac I'd go for Pro Tools &/or Logic.
 
Really, any of those that 10s mentioned will do ya’. (Except Logic. Mac only :( Great program, though.) I use ProTools, but I get a discount. (It’s the only way I can afford some of the stuff.)

To use ProTools you need Digidesign hardware, Mbox mini being the cheapest retail. As far as I know, none of the others have specific hardware needs like that.

I use Propellerhead’s Reason for syntheses and sampling. (BTW, using Reason’s NN-XT sampler is perfect for footstep Foley.) Reason will Rewire to almost any DAW.

What are your needs? What’s your budget? What do you have already? All this will impact what you get.
 
Steinberg Nuendo is the best. And you don't have to put up with hardware elitism at all. Not to mention it's a lot more powerful and flexible than protools. I love audition for editing though.
 
I would go with Pro Tools. It's the most widely used. If you get good with Pro Tools, you can walk into any recording studio in the world and fit right in (when I say any, I mean 95% or whatever). I've also heard Nuendo is awesome. I can't wait to try it.
 
Nuendo is the one I like the best. I have been a Pro-tools guy since my old Hit Factory days, But Nuendo is far superior IMO. BUT Pro-tools is still the standard at almost every MAJOR studio in the country. Basically to me, It boils down to; Use what you like and if you get the Results you were hoping for than It really does not matter what you use.
 
j.mart said:
Steinberg Nuendo is the best. And you don't have to put up with hardware elitism at all. Not to mention it's a lot more powerful and flexible than protools. I love audition for editing though.
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Agreed. I am about to start scoring and doing the sound design and I have not tried to bring a video file into nuendo. Is that something you can do? I have never heard of Audition. How does that work?
 
filthrich said:
Agreed. I am about to start scoring and doing the sound design and I have not tried to bring a video file into nuendo. Is that something you can do? I have never heard of Audition. How does that work?
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yes you can.. that's all i do on nuendo these days. i think nuendo will become the king of all DAWs as soon as people wake up and see it's waaay superior to protools. very intuitive, a lot of smart functionalities that PT is far from having. you can tell it was designed with a lot of input by sound techs themselves. that's steinberg quality right there. a few hours after working with it, you'll find yourself very agile in it and you'll never look back on PT again. the smart features that lack on PT are worth the try alone .


audition is adobe's leading (only?!) DAW. it's pretty lame as a sequencer but i find it very powerful for generic sound editing, such as filtering, EQ'ing and analysis. it's spectral view helps a lot finding generic noise you can't always detect easily with an EQ sweep. it's pretty affordable too.
 
RyanT said:
I use digital performer and like it a good deal. Am I weird?
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actually I've been a protools user for about 7 or 8 years now and only stick with it becuase I know it so well. It is great for producing music for cd distibution, but for scoring to picture it is really lacking. Course one cool thing that 7.1 introduced was the ability to bring in HD quicktime files, which definately helps. I have heard great things about digital performer as far as scoring to picture, not weird at all. I have to say the best thing about my setup would be Reason...it truly is a very, very versatile tool. It takes a little tweaking to get the quality out of it but if you learn it the sky it the limit. Unfortunately there is little support for syncing sound with picture in it as well. I know a guy who's main client is CBS national...He is really a top notch pro for sound design literally only scores to picture; He thinks Cubase is the way to go for this type of work. I worked with him for a while and it's definately not an easy switch from protools to cubase, but if you've got time to learn an entirely different program it may be worth the effort. I just realized I may just made things more confusing...to summarize, everyone has there workflow and if you know it well you will do great with any of these programs, if I were to start over again I would probably go with Cubase.
 
filthrich said:
Nuendo is the one I like the best. I have been a Pro-tools guy since my old Hit Factory days, But Nuendo is far superior IMO. BUT Pro-tools is still the standard at almost every MAJOR studio in the country. Basically to me, It boils down to; Use what you like and if you get the Results you were hoping for than It really does not matter what you use.
Click to expand...

Actually, a LOT of people are moving from Pro-Tools to Nuendo. The thing about Pro-Tools is that when it came out, computers weren't powerful enough hardware-wise to handle a bunch of different tracks that ran at the same time. These days, that's really no longer an issue since hardware is able to keep up as well as the Pro-Tools hardware of yesteryear.

Since Pro-Tools has been around for so long and that was the only viable option due the the hardware issues, coupled with the fact that it's owned by AVID, well... there ya go... that's mainly why it's the leading software.

Nuendo isn't cheap though... Cubase will do pretty much the same stuff. It's the same company, Steinberg (which was recently bought out by Yamaha), so it uses the exact same audio engine. There are certain differences though, such as surround sound mixing, etc. You can find the differences between the 2 at their website (do a Google search).

Also, don't rule out Sonar. It's great for doing audio. I know Justin (Edgen) uses it to score soundtracks and he's a professional film musician.

And since Sonar only runs on PC, it's got a familiar Windows type interface.
 
Nuendo folks have been going on about it as a "PT Killer" for a long time. It's an old argument but but no more valid today than when it started. There have been a number of DAW's for post-production over the years and PT has gone from a tiny market share to the largest by far. The reality is that what ever DAW you are most familiar with is the one that is the "best". I have at times worked on Nuendo and I found it slow and cumbersome to use. But unlike the rah rah folks I'm not going to blame the app. I'm sure if I used it as much as I use PT I would be happy with it. If your working in the EU there are a fair number of studios that have at least one Nuendo system. If your in the US and doing post PT is the app that pretty much every studio will have, Nuendo is much less common. If you don't need to go to another studio then you can use anything you want. Music is also a lot more flexible about what your working on. It's almost impossible to talk about what's going to work for "sound design" till you define what you mean by that. Sound design for film doesn't have a hard definition. If you are creating sounds to send to editors then it makes very little difference what you create the sounds with. If your creating sequences that need to merge with others sessions then you need to work in the same app that the rest of the production is working in.
The hurdles that Nuendo needs to jump to become a "standard" are multi fold. It needs to seem like it's going to stick around. It's very much viewed as a "prosumer" application (not totally justified but that is the perception) and as a professional I am very reluctant to learn an app that might just go away. Until they have a large installed post base the plugin makers and third party support apps we all depend on are either not going to support it or are going to lag with support. A number of tools I use all the time would be out if I switched.
The other catch is that it's not the "norm" so you might have a harder time landing work. It's not a capability question but a perception one. When I was on a different DAW back when I was constantly having to justify why I wasn't using PT.

So it depends on what you want to do and how much you have to work with others. As a supervisor I wouldn't have a mixed post. If something goes wrong it's my butt. I can get PT running on just about anything and there are a ton of folks I can call to borrow a system if need be. That is not the case with any other DAW (ie I can't set them up and I don't know a bunch of folks with systems I could borrow in a pinch).

If you move to a Mac and have FCP you will also end up with Sound Track Pro. And while I don't think it is as robust as either Nuendo or PT it integrates nicely with FCP and if your not working on a Hollywood feature it's probably capable enough.

The last question is whether your doing music. As the last comment below mentions Audition's weakness as a sequencer. If your doing post editing and sound design you will rarely if ever use any of the MIDI editing/ sequencing features of any DAW. That is not the case if your doing a lot of music. Other than for "rendering" some MIDI sequences I have never used MIDI with PT except as a controller connection to my control surface.


j.mart said:
yes you can.. that's all i do on nuendo these days. i think nuendo will become the king of all DAWs as soon as people wake up and see it's waaay superior to protools. very intuitive, a lot of smart functionalities that PT is far from having. you can tell it was designed with a lot of input by sound techs themselves. that's steinberg quality right there. a few hours after working with it, you'll find yourself very agile in it and you'll never look back on PT again. the smart features that lack on PT are worth the try alone .


audition is adobe's leading (only?!) DAW. it's pretty lame as a sequencer but i find it very powerful for generic sound editing, such as filtering, EQ'ing and analysis. it's spectral view helps a lot finding generic noise you can't always detect easily with an EQ sweep. it's pretty affordable too.
Click to expand...
 
Some corrections. Avid bought Digidesign after it was the DAW of choice (only a few years ago). PT was not the first DAW or the only choice it was the cheap alternative to a number of other systems. Dyaxis, Wave Frame, Sonic Solutions, Synclavier to name a few. Ten years ago or so Wave Frame was a MAJOR player and Sonic was becoming a big player. Digi was the little guy.
Second while you are largely correct about computing power the digi hardware is doing more than just off loading tasks. And there is still advantages to having some plugins running on dedicated DSP chips. After you buy a comparable audio interface for your non PT system there isn't a huge difference in cost. If you have a nice new 8core to use you can probably get pretty much the same performance as a PTHD system, but the PT system could be running on a G4 and be very solid.

And as I said earlier, if your doing music it's a different deal. Technically the music folks aren't even on the sound crew. They come in often with there own systems and it's just a lot more flexible about what your working on.


Tom Marshall said:
Actually, a LOT of people are moving from Pro-Tools to Nuendo. The thing about Pro-Tools is that when it came out, computers weren't powerful enough hardware-wise to handle a bunch of different tracks that ran at the same time. These days, that's really no longer an issue since hardware is able to keep up as well as the Pro-Tools hardware of yesteryear.

Since Pro-Tools has been around for so long and that was the only viable option due the the hardware issues, coupled with the fact that it's owned by AVID, well... there ya go... that's mainly why it's the leading software.

Nuendo isn't cheap though... Cubase will do pretty much the same stuff. It's the same company, Steinberg (which was recently bought out by Yamaha), so it uses the exact same audio engine. There are certain differences though, such as surround sound mixing, etc. You can find the differences between the 2 at their website (do a Google search).

Also, don't rule out Sonar. It's great for doing audio. I know Justin (Edgen) uses it to score soundtracks and he's a professional film musician.

And since Sonar only runs on PC, it's got a familiar Windows type interface.
Click to expand...
 
On a related topic, can you all recommend a decent forum (besides this one, of course!) dedicated to DAWs in the same way DVXUser is dedicated to filmmaking? I am evaluating FL Studio, Ableton Live, Sony Acid and others to replace my Cubase SX3 and was wondering what resources I should be checking out when making this decision.

Thanks in advance.
 
Back to the original post, I think what it all comes down to, Blade, is what are your audio intentions? You haven't posted since your original post to clarify your position (probably because you weren't expecting such an opinionated discussion). You originally mentioned sound design, so I'm guessing that you mean mostly sound FX for films. Judging from other posts that you've made in the forum, I'm also guessing that you're a filmmaker and you want a tool to work on sound design for your own movies , is that correct? If that's the case, you don't really need to worry about what is the most popular tool or what is the best tool, etc. In the end they are all tools to accomplish a task and any one of them will work as good as the other. People have their personal preferences and needs which is why there are so many different opinions in this thread, but in the end we all get the job done. It's really like trying to compare one hammer with another. Yeah this hammer has a really nice grip, while this one feels balanced and this one has a larger striking surface, but they all do the same thing. You should probably try out different programs and see which one will work for you. Start with whatever you have the most immediate access to. As your needs progress you'll form your own opinion on which hammer is the right hammer for you.

Also, I would consider trying to spend some money on a sound FX library. That will be far more useful for sound design than paying top dollar for a tricked out DAW. Of course, that opens up a whole other can of worms as to which library to get. That as well, is also dependent on what you hope to accomplish in your movies.
 
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