2022 interface and DAW

[Jeffw5555]

I am not a professional musician nor a professional audio engineer. I enjoy making music and recording it and have been doing this for 50 years. I have several UAD products and have been more than pleased with both the products and their support over the years. UAD is going thru a tricky evolution with their software as it has become harder and harder to move forward with a captive DSP approach, thus the migration to native. I had an Apollo Twin MkII Quad which was great, but needed to upgrade my studio computer. The MKII generation of Apollos are Thunderbolt 2 devices and worked fine with my previous DAW computer running TB3 using a TB3/TB2 converter, but latest computers are all TB4 which isn't compatible with TB2, so I upgraded my setup to an Apollo X8. It was basically plug and play to upgrade, and I am really happy with the whole setup right now. I have a rack full of older hardware, and it was always problematic to send audio to the external hardware using the Twin; it really wasn't intended for that. The X8, however, makes this really easy, so that simplified things for me.

I am an old school guitarist, still have my trusty 1971 Marshall JMP50 amp, but hadn't used it much for like 20 years because it only sounded great cranked and I found it hard to play it loud, which I changed a few years ago by going to a UAD OX Box setup. I have a number of other amps as well, several Mesas, a Diezel, couple others. My current setup now is two UAD OX boxes running speaker emulation, and the sound thru headphones with the amps cranked is pretty much identical to the sound coming from the cabs. (except I do miss the active feedback at times)

I started with Cakewalk when they came out, and when they went defunct I switched to Cubase. The entire studio setup I have now works great and it quite efficient and easy to use. And if I record something and it doesn't sound good, I cannot blame the hardware or software.

 

[Quantum J Audio]

Believe it or not I'm still using protools 8 with an 002 rack
But I'm finding myself limited with no more updates blah blah blah.

What are the DAW option with little learning curve?
What you guys suggest a nice update from the 002 rack? I was considering MOTU but they have lots of troubles with hardware.

Suggestions please.

Depends on what you want to achieve. If you want to work in the a pro studio environment in tracking and mixing pro tools is still very much industry standard.

A lot of writer producers I work with are in Logic or ableton. They always bounce to wav file and I mix out of Pro Tools.

If you are on pro tools 8 then your learning curve will be less sticking in tools. You’d probably get frustrated editing audio in Logic or Ableton if you are used to Pro Tools.