If you're ready to learn even more about the flagship DAW Digital Performer, this series is a must see. Next, Eli dedicates a whole category to working with movies in Digital Performer 8, and wraps up the collection with 4 in-depth tutorials dedicated to different ways to boost your productivity and workflow. There are complete POLAR, Step Recording and Drum Editor overviews, as well as an "in action" tutorial for each.
He then dives into DP8's feature packed waveform editor and includes topics such as beat detection, groove extraction and applying it to other audio files, among many other topics.Įli then gets creative and shows you how to make new parts in alternative ways. Shot in the latest version 8, and over 4 hours long, Eli steps it up with tutorials about groove quantize, humanize and other cool MIDI editor functions. I found that I liked working with the Tracks view to the top left, audio or MIDI editing in the bottom left, and the mixing board to the right, but you can create just about any setup using the horizontal and vertical drawbars in each window.THE NEXT STEP IN DIGITAL PERFORMER 8 TRAININGĮli Krantzberg is back with "Digital Performer 8 Advanced" which is sure to please those looking for deeper, more advanced information on this powerhouse DAW by MOTU. The consolidated interface lets you display multiple views simultaneously.
User Interface and RecordingIf you've used Digital Performer before, you'll find the main user interface environment instantly familiar.
But I personally have no problem with software activations as long as they work reliably and are easy to perform.
Apple Logic Pro and the PC-based Cakewalk SONAR still lead in that they don't require copy protection at all. This is far preferable to Steinberg's copy protection scheme for Cubase 7, which uses a proprietary eLicenser dongle, or Avid's for Pro Tools 10, which relies on the more common but still frustrating iLok key-both of which take up one of the two precious USB ports on all Mac laptops.
Install and activate DP8 on a third machine, and it doesn't fight you it just deactivates the first one. On the software side, MOTU gives you two activations, so you can use the program on, say, a desktop and a laptop. Part of the reason for that is that the program still lacks key virtual instrument plug-ins (more on that later).įortunately, there's no hardware-based copy protection.
Digital Performer installs very quickly, as it takes up just 1.7GB of hard disk space. System Requirements and Plug-in Formats For this review, I tested Digital Performer 8 on two machines: a quad-core Mac Pro (2009) running OS X Lion, and a quad-core MacBook Pro 15-inch (2012) running OS X Mountain Lion. On the Mac, at least, I've been using Digital Performer on and off for over 20 years, with my first experience being with the MIDI-only Performer in a college music lab on a Mac IIsi this latest version is a true pleasure to work with. When MOTU introduced version 8 last October, the company announced a PC version for the first time, and it's now finally becoming available. In the digital audio-enabled version's eighth iteration ($499 list), MOTU's flagship DAW remains a premier tool for MIDI composition and film scoring, and it contains enough audio-editing tools to serve as a solid all-around multitrack recorder. If there's a single digital audio workstation package that's more closely associated with the Mac than any other, it's MOTU's Digital Performer.