PreSonus has entered the DAW market with Studio One, a full-featured application that is intended to challenge the mature DAWs already on the market. PreSonus' intention was to introduce an application that is deep and powerful from the beginning, yet lean; as opposed to its competitors that have bolted on new features with every revision, yielding bloated behemoths that can really bog down the CPU. PreSonus started fresh with a super-efficient free-ware DAW called Kristal, developed by Wolfgang Kundrus and Matthias Juwan, who were involved with the development of Cubase and Nuendo for Steinberg. PreSonus teamed with these two to develop both Studio One and Capture, which is the simple recording application that ships with PreSonus' StudioLive console.
I unboxed and installed Studio One (the Pro version - a lighter "Artist" version is also available) onto my 1.83GHz MacBook and started evaluating what PreSonus has said about it. Among other things, they tout a "new-generation audio engine under the hood," which defaults to 64-bit operation, but switches on the fly to accommodate 32-bit plug-ins. I am indeed impressed with the quality of the audio, even with lower-quality DACs. PreSonus also says the application is "compatible and easy to configure," meaning that it will work with no muss or fuss with any ASIO, Windows Audio, or CoreAudio-compliant interface. It is definitely compatible with every interface I threw at it, but it would not see a USB microphone, and that definitely needs to be addressed. Presonus says that certain existing USB microphones use WDM/MME drivers---drivers the company considers "old technology". A company representative says newer USB microphones will work with Studio One.
The "innovative start page" they offer is truly awesome - excellent from a project management perspective. The application is generally "easy to navigate" as PreSonus says, but takes a little getting used to if you're accustomed to another DAW. Its "song page" one-window workspace corrals all the elements together nicely - edit, mix, and browse functions, and the mix window is detachable for relocation to a second computer monitor.
Studio One offers a suite of mastering tools, which links all the songs in a "project" so that changes to one are automatically updated in the others. Another feature I truly love here is PreSonus' Control Link MIDI mapping, which facilitates simple and powerful mapping of any MIDI control to any plug-in parameter. This is powerful. And regarding plug-ins, a nice suite of native plug-ins is included, but VST 2, VST 3, and AU formats are supported --- as is ReWire. Another thing that I really like is random access undo (as opposed to sequential undo,) and undo is only limited by the computer's resources. Studio One's real-time audio timestretching is very nice, but lacking is an audio-quantization tool like Pro Tools' Beat Detective.
I learned quickly that drag-n-drop is the order of the day with Studio One - and despite taking me a moment to acclimate, this way of working is efficient and quick for me. The number of channels, buses, effects, MIDI tracks, and virtual instruments is limited only by your CPU and RAM. Nearly anything can be automated, and the app boasts automatic delay compensation. That's a pretty big deal. The app ships with four virtual instruments (drum sample trigger, sample player, "Digital Sound Factory," and an analog-modeling subtractive synth. Also included are Native Instruments' Kore Player with 150 instruments, and a nice collection of loops, among other musical resources.
I made a few recordings and also dragged in some loops and discovered that I was really enjoying the process. I was able to mix 16 tracks with quite a few plug-ins and moderate bussing, and my CPU didn't even flinch. This app truly is lean in that sense of the word, and that is very welcome. If you are in the market for a DAW with advanced MIDI and virtual instrument capabilities, I definitely recommend trying this one.
