I got my start in the mixing business many moons ago mixing audio for a national television broadcast. It was music and spoken word, I learned a lot, and wish I knew then….
I used a Sony MCI console and 2” tape machine with a track dedicated to SMPTE time code. I would do the mix for the producers, play back the the 2” feeding time code to the video deck to keep it all in sync.
About that time digital audio was just emerging. We made the switch from 2” tape to ADAT. Why, I’ll never know.
We also made another purchase at that time. A piece of software “Sound Forge” from a company called “Sonic Foundry”. Now we were able to do editing non destructively but only on two track masters.
Fast forward a few years, and I purchased “Pro Tools 6”. It would allow me to do non destructive editing across several tracks, not only that but you could use it to mix and it had powerful automation features for that time.
Now the problem was if you didn’t have enough TDM cards with processing chips, you ran out of power and couldn’t do any more EQ’ing and stuff like that so it was a lot of money for a lot of processing power. Then, I started to get projects from friends to work on at home. That’s what had me looking into the native DAW world.
The first Native program I tried was called N-Track studio. It had a lot of cool features, but crashed all the time. I then found a program that caught my attention because it had a 30 day working demo, called “Samplitude.” I actually ended up using “Samplitude” for a really long time, and still use it today. But I needed more….
Sonic Foundry released a program called “Vegas” I thought I would try that since I knew “Sound Forge”, but it wasn’t really strong in audio, it became more of a video editing program.
My old console days were still calling from the past, so i wanted to find something that would give me the most power for mixing. I found a program called “SAWstudio”. I owned that for a while, and it was actually very powerful for mixing but it lacked a lot of features most modern DAWs have and some essential ones like being able to import BWF, so long “SAW”.
Back to “Samplitude”.
I demo’ed “Adobe Auditon” because I had used “Cool Edit Pro” to cut dialog at work. It wasn’t any better to me because it lacked serious mixing tools.
In the mean time we upgraded our “Pro Tools” system to an HD system, and WOW was I impressed! The mixing tools are fantastic! This is what I need at home! Alas, the $14,000 price tag prevented that. So using PTHD at work started a quest for something as powerful for home. I tried “Pro Tools LE” but as the title says, it’s a Light Edition, and doesn’t have the powerful tools that HD does.
Next, I decided to leave DAW’s and used a “Mackie D8b” for a while. I really liked that. I guess mainly because it was a MIXER! Faders, automation…again! Woohoo. then Mackie killed it.
Back to the DAW’s.
So….I’ve had my eye on “Nuendo”,mainly because it came highly recommended by some industry giants… but never tried it because there was no demo. I heard all kinds of good things about it but at $1800 I wanted to test it out first. I made several attempts at purchasing it but never felt right, and at one point cancelled my order and upgraded “Samplitude” instead. Still, in the back of my mind “Nuendo” seemed to have the power I needed, especially with the “Euphonix” automation package.
Then it happened….patience and perseverance pays off! I found a used copy of “Nuendo” for sale! Then, I found a used Nuendo controller locally. At the price, it was worth it to try it out because I could easily sell it again and get my money back out of it.
Now I have Nuendo and a controller for less than half of the cost of buying just the program new. I found a good deal and upgraded to the new version and am now enjoying the mixing tools that the program has to offer, still at less than half price. IS my journey over? Hardly…but I think I’ll be camping here for a very long time.
Why write this? First to encourage someone to wait for something if you really want it, it will come to you! Second, to help explaining why I have such a hard time with what I call my DAW ADD. I have fun with it on facebook, sometimes stirring up a little trouble, but it’s not meant to be anything but poking fun at myself, and pointing out that no DAW is 100% perfect.
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