I Tried Every Free DAW to Find the Best One

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[jhevon]

0:15 Bandlab
5:22 Soundtrap
8:44 LMMS
12:58 Reaper

[ups_]

Here are my 2 favorite free DAWs:
- fl studio (cracked)
- ableton live (cracked)

[Prodbydrw]

bro bandlab sounds is lowkey underated. they got hella shit for free.

[joeletarte]

I love seeing big producers using LMMS. I used it for about 13 years before finally getting FL studio, which is much easier, but LMMS still feels like home to me. It takes some creativity, but you can make some good stuff with it.

[rano]

Oh boy. As a Reaper user for the last couple of years, I totally understand your experience because it was similar to my experience when I tried Reaper for the first time. But after trying pretty much every major daw under the sun like pro tools, ableton, fl, bitwig, s1, cubase etc. etc. I decided to stick with Reaper because it's the most customizable and most flexible and one of the most powerful daw out there. But one of the biggest downside of Reaper is that the UI doesn't look as good and pretty as most other daws and the hotkeys out of the box is not the best, especially if you've used any other daw before.

But man, when I tell you this is the most powerful and most flexible daw I've ever used in my life, I mean it. There's nothing that you can't do in Reaper. Every single thing is customizable in Reaper, it's so customizable and not just that you can download themes to make it look like a completely another daw, but you can basically replicate workflows and hotkeys from other daws or combine workflows from other daws and make really powerful and fast workflows and literally customize the right click context menus. It's extremely powerful and CPU efficient, like it runs better on apple hardware than apple's own daw.

Reaper is definitely not one of those daws that you can just download and start making beats seamlessly out of the box like FL or LPX, although I'm sure there are people who've done the exact same. But Reaper is a daw that will take some more initial investment and some setting up, but it will give you a lot more in return and saves hours and hours of your life in the future. I've been using Reaper for a few years now and after customizing it, it takes me 1/5 of the time to make beats compared to when I was using FL. Reaper is in a league of it's own, so I hope you'd give it another try in the future.

[tonybonestheproducer]

Reaper for mixing. Actually far superior to any other daw for so many reasons! So cpu efficient as well 🔥

[blxncobxndzzz]

yo bro as a pretty avid producer on bandlab i wanted to lyk that you can actually make drums way better by pulling one shots into the sampler and using that instead of the drum machine. a combo of soundtrap and bandlab is a good way to make a beat as well. i tend to make the 808s and some melodies in soundtrap and then use the sampler to make the drums in bandlab. preciate your videos tho.

[PIKTVRE]

I used to produce in Soundtrap for 1, 5 years so when you played these sounds, instant nostalgia hit me cause every time I thought, , Hey, I know that sound, I used it in that song of mine" lol

But yeah definitely a very limiting DAW, even in the supreme version. I wouldn't say it was a wasted 1, 5 years, but I'm definitely glad I made a switch to FL half a year ago, I finally feel free haha

[myauramusic]

Reaper for creating Metal/rock as a musician is incredible. Not sure how it is for making trap beats n pop but for a Metal musician i love it

[YoungFang]

Big shout out to reaper man, so much value for free

[locutz]

The nice thing bout reaper is that you can customize it any which way you like, it's super lightweight and powerful

[Soundwaiv]

Used to live in London when I was younger. It's cool seeing a producer from there! Keep it up man :)

[kxdsh]

LMMS's EQ looked sick it looks much more professional than the rest of the DAW

[luut]

you need to give band lab another try, you can drag in the one shots into the sampler and use them from there

[ReaperRealmYT]

Reaper is not only the most powerful DAW in this video, but it's also the most powerful, flexible, versatile daw in the market. But It does have a steeper learning curve than any other daw out of the box, but it's so worth learning it because there's nothing you can't do in Reaper. Anything that's possible in other daws, it's also possible in Reaper. Everything you wanted to do in this video in Reaper can be done.

Like there's a browser in Reaper, it's under view > Media explorer or the hotkey ctrl + alt + x. The media explorer in Reaper is way more powerful and feature rich than the browser in FL or Ableton or Logic, like you detect pitch and synch with the project tempo and half time and double time the samples directly from the browser and also route the signal through an fx chain and do other crazy stuff. And it seems like in the latest FL update, they've copied one of the features from Reaper. Reaper also comes with a sampler called Reasamplomatic500, long name, but it's pretty powerful, and you can add your samples to make 808s there pretty easily. To delete a note, you can double left click or right click and chose delete or press delete.

[prodfawad]

my first DAW was LMMS, made probably 10 beats on that one. 😂

[AvidBeats]

I started on Soundtrap in 2017 and watched loads of videos in 2018 and switched to logic in 2019! Big ups ocean.

[tmbgabe]

bro i haven’t seen u in YEARS…. THE HAIR i was watching u 24/7

[unfinishedmonkeyrecords]

Reaper is BY FAR the best daw of these those, everything is customizable. Yes, it may have some learning curve but it's the most expandable daw ever. You can actually create your drumkits being part of a bus, you can add markers for more sliced beats (You only had your 4 beats set) so you can more easily time your high hats... Reaper has everything any professional daw has and more... You can do everything from arrangement and mixing to mastering in one project in reaper and you can do it all simultaneously as well... it's not too hard on cpu and as said before its 100% customizable, you can even make your own shortcuts if you don't like the existing ones...

[GageIGuess]

That scroll cursor that was showing when you were trying to get the audio to stretch correctly to the BPM allows you to make specific adjustments down to the .1's.
Band-Lab allows for velocity changes as well, which is found in the MIDI editor in the top left of the MIDI UI.
The Sampler is how you obtain better sounds in Band-Lab.