Multi-track Recording Software, Software that is simple and works in OSX Options

[Dadoo]

I'm just getting into the fascinating world of digital music recording. My wife and I play music together for small and large group things. I would like to be able to add some fullness to our sound by creating our own accompaniment CD's so that we can play along with a "full band", so to speak.

I just got the M-Audio Audiophile USB and it came with a "lite" version of Ableton DELTA Live. I've played around with it some and have recorded a couple of things. I find it rather complicated for what I'm doing, as I think it is more of a looping/sequencing instrument that just happens to have recording capabilities. I also find it frustrating to get sound consistently in and out of the program as I seem to have to quit and restart the program for it to recognize that I have an audio input for it. But this may be beside the point because I think it is not the right program for what I want to do.

I have hear a little about a shareware program for OS X called Jasmine. I see that I can download a demo of it. Does anyone have any experience with this program? Basically what I want to do is to plug in my bass, guitar, keyboard, drum machine, maybe some backing vocals, and record them on different tracks and then make them into an AIFF file that can be burned onto a CD. I want it to be simple and able to produce good digital quality sound. Will Jasmine work for me? Is there another simple and basic program that works in OS X that I should look at?

I'm doing my recording on a 600 MHz iMac, running OS 10.2.8, with 512 MB of RAM.

Thanks for your replies. I know I have much to learn!

[braj]

Tracktion also has Rewire support, which allows me to use it with Reason with incredible ease. Neither Metro nor Intuem offer this.

[Dadoo]

Tracktion also has Rewire support, which allows me to use it with Reason with incredible ease. Neither Metro nor Intuem offer this.

Thanks again, braj. Your comments are quite detailed and are answering a lot of the questions I have.

What does Rewire do (so that I know if I would use it or want to use it in the future)?

[braj]

Tracktion also has Rewire support, which allows me to use it with Reason with incredible ease. Neither Metro nor Intuem offer this.

Thanks again, braj. Your comments are quite detailed and are answering a lot of the questions I have.

What does Rewire do (so that I know if I would use it or want to use it in the future)?

Rewire allows various audio and midi apps to work together, sending audio and midi signals between each other. Reason is a techno-heavy application that is awesome, but you can't record audio. Using Rewire, you can use Reason as a bank of sounds for Tracktion or another Rewire-ready app (most pro apps support this). It works wonderfully and extends the functionality of every app that uses it. I mentioned it because it gives you another avenue of flexibility that Metro and Intuem can't offer.

[Dadoo]

Thanks for the explanation braj, although I will admit ignorance to much of what you said. I would guess that I will get "into" a lot of the terminology you are using as I use the program and become more "techno-savvy". Your comment about extending the flexibility is a strong selling point for this entry level software as it allows the user (me!) to grow into and perhaps extend further.

Again, I appreciate your help.

[Dadoo]

Hi again braj. I contacted the Tracktion guys about my current system setup with Tracktion. The guy from there sent an e-mail saying he felt it was a bit on the slow side (my system) but he has heard of users with a similar configuration using it.

[braj]

The beautiful thing about Tracktion is that you can freeze tracks or render them to audio, so even if your system isn't that fast, you'll likely get the best performance available in comparison to other DAW apps. If you use this feature (which is super-simple) you won't have any performance problems. Even if you do have some clicks or skips here and there when recording (they will probably be minor) they wont be there when you mix down to .aiff anyway.

Really, I was in a similar position as you recently and I bought Metro, GarageBand, and tested out Intuem and I really feel Tracktion offers the best featureset, UI, performance, and price of them all. I hadn't messed about with Midi for 12 years until January, so it's not like I had set ways of doing things. I just looked for the path of least resistance, and Tracktion was it.

[Dadoo]

Excellent braj. Your comments are very helpful. Thank you.

[Dadoo]

I posted this message in my "poll" but thought it also fit here, for anyone else's benefit.

Well, here's the update on my experience thus far. I downloaded Tracktion (demo) and have found the time to record a short little instrumental piece with an acoustic, electric, and bass. I was able to add effects to the tracks that I wanted and was able to easily adjust the volume of each of the 3 tracks to levels that were complimentary. I was surprised at how quickly a newbie like myself could does this stuff. I have a ton to learn still but so far Tracktion makes it easy. I even learned how to connect my old Yamaha keyboard to my Audiophile USB interface, load a midi file into Tracktion and have it played for my on my keyboard. Probably old hat for many of you, but to me .... amazing!

I did download Intuem (demo) to try it out as well. So far, a big disappointment. Tried to do the midi thing with it and it wouldn't play. It just kept freezing up my computer. And not like just the program freezing up, but its freezing up did it to every other program I tried to open up, so I had to restart my computer (which I rarely have to do in OS 10.2.8). So I'm not impressed with Intuem at all.