It runs slickly on a PC, and offers this smooth music-making experience with enough extras – including a large and well-implemented sound library – to help you make pretty much any genre of music you could wish for. Certainly just shy of 200 bucks (and actually on offer at just $149 as we write this) is a great price to pay for such an extensive feature set and friction-free workflow. Perhaps more welcome is the additional functionality within the mixer – with new Gain, Drive, Compressor and other effects as standard along the channel strip – plus the automation features which allow curved, tempo and pitch automation and are very easy to implement and offer some excellent and precise control (not to mention optional LFO control) over your mix movement and evolution.Ĭross-platform DAW that also boasts great features for the cash.Ī DAW with some neat compositional features built in and again, great value.Īs to whether you should take the leap from your existing DAW, that is always the harder question to answer. Back to more instrumental plugins and Acoustica Vocoder allows you to get some robot vocal action into your music not essential, you might say, but useful for some genres. However, the new additions mean that the library covers just about every mixing and mastering function you could wish for – this side of Mixcraft really is very well featured indeed. The new TB bundle of multi effects (including MultiFX, Reverb, Parametric EQ, BusCompressor, Barricade, De-esser and Compressor), is, of course, welcome but finds itself in a crowded field that already includes Mastering Essentials from iZotope and dozens of other mixing and creative effects that are very good indeed. Here you get 45 software modules – including oscillators, effects and arpeggiator – so you can quickly experience the joys of hardware modular synthesis in your DAW. So to the newcomers and Cherry Audio’s modular synth system needs no introduction to regular readers as a version of it is featured in the Plugin Suite. The new additions mean that the library covers just about every mixing and mastering function you could wish for – this side of Mixcraft really is very well featured indeed However, once you get into it, this feeling soon passes loading instruments and effects, resizing, and customising all become second nature. The panel detachment feature is new to v9 – you could only do it with the lower panel in v8 – and it adds a great level of customisation to how the software is laid out, and you will want to use it, as taken as one block, Mixcraft can initially feel daunting. What we’ve always loved about this DAW is the smooth resizing of Windows so the mixer, for example, invades your arrangement just to the level you wish, and track width and height adjustments, along with zooming, are all slick and precise. It’s a very easy process and the installer takes you through all of the extras so you’ll soon be up and running. You’ll also likely have to use a separate code and download to unlock the aforementioned Voltage Modular. (Image credit: Future) Performance and verdictĪfter buying, you’ll download the main 9 Pro installer (around 540MB) and unlock it with a serial code. Some of Mixcraft’s existing plugins look a little old school but sound a lot better. These refinements and a series of pro features have come through regular updates over many years that have seen the software mature to its current ‘Pro Studio’ status, and its Computer Music scores have grown accordingly (from a not so great 6/10 for its debut to 9/10s from version 5 onwards). There’s a well-featured mixer where you expect it to be and the UI is very welcoming indeed and easy to interact with, so the workflow is almost second to none on this platform. It’s a traditional DAW in the sense that tracks go top to bottom and arrangement flows left to right. Mixcraft has always offered a welcoming music production environment with a claimed ‘great ease of use combined with raw power’, and it’s hard to argue with this. (There’s also a cut-down Recording Studio version at $99 that lacks the Celemony Melodyne integration, a lot of the included plugin instruments and effects and other features, so we think Pro Studio is well worth the extra 100 bucks.) It might also not be on your radar because it’s a PC-only DAW, but if it is on your radar, you’ll know it comes packed with enough features to be a serious PC contender, and at just $199 for the top-end Pro Studio version on test here, it’s a bargain to boot.
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