Useful video on DAWs
Pro Tools or real Studio?
# 1
Whatever suites you as a DAW, a lot rides on the quality and resolution of your audio interface and your inital recording, location, techniques and experience, if doing it yourself. If you can afford to go to an established studio to be recorded, go for it, I guess it may not matter to you what DAW they're using, if using tape the cost of tape productions these days must be astronomical.
While Pro-tools may be (self) proclaimed as the "industry standard", and may have become so by its own promotion in learning institutions, and done a good job at that. Standard may not mean the best, like Guitar Tricks I would consider better than what may be considered "standard" guitar lessons, lol ZZSmilieZZ.
Essentially, most common DAW's function the same, using different user graphical interfaces and possibly logical processes to acheive same goals, a final mix of tracks that will be mastered into a final production format as required, likely but not necessarily by different and specific mastering software.
Most DAW providers offer a free limited version, or time constrained full trial versions, it may be worthwhile trying them and seeing what suites your personal preference and thought processes before commiting to one. Personally I find Pro-tools GUI to appear somewhat archaic, or cartoon like, and not so user friendly workflow until its well understood, while it may be considered the "industry standard", I prefer better or outside what is considered standard. Also eventually if doing anything serious youll need to upgrade to include adequate numder of track capabilities, add-ons and plugin fx software, virtual instruments, all of which gets quiet costly and possibly proprietary in the Pro-Tools world, albeit all DAW providers are not in co-operation with each other to allow easily exchanging processed projects files between each others product, although third party FX add-ons may work in many/most different DAW's. Pro-tools advantage may be many studios and schools have adopted it as their standard DAW, and has become so, also more geared towards Mac/Apple computer systems, (albeit they have Windows version also),which were once superior in audio and video processing, (and cost) and may be still be somewhat the case, possibly also still better on the video production side.
For Windows based systems only (currently) I use what I consider better than industry standard, or Pro-tools, for workflow, GUI, addons, plugins (and cost) is (Gibsons, formerly Rolands) Cakewalk's Sonar DAW software. But its not without its issues as all have, its been around a long time in some format and I have evolved with it over many years, it suites my needs and preferences, they also have some more basic recording softwares. In any case Im able to produce any final mix of at least the same quality as I can using Pro-Tools, and I dont use either to for the final mastering and prodiuction of the final mix *.wav files into various media formats anyway, sorry gotta go now.
Cheers
# 2
