Alternative software

[walker]

Hello,

I have been thinking of replace my Orion with something else, since no one knows if/when there will be more updates. Do you have any other music software to recommend? Among other things, I would like to have a good step sequencer (like Orion's drum module and sampler) and it should be easy to learn, not take too much CPU power.

regards,
Anders

[heks]

No one seems to be answering Anders, so I'll tell you me experience. I own or try'd most of the main and obscure DAW's over the years and always faithfully used Orion. When Richard announced Orion was discontinued and a number of plugins kept crashing Orion, it was a wakeup call to seriously look at DAWs with continued development. I would recommend having a look at MuLab. There's a free version to try, I use the Edit screen to work in a similar way to Orion. Its not Orion by any stretch of the imagination , but worth considering.
I've reduced what I initially wrote as it started to sound too much like a fan boy advert.
I would love to see what DAW Richard, Marcin and Jo (MuTools) could cook up together.

[megawattt]

Hi there Walker and Heks.

I did want to make a comment on this post but i was worried because all this talk about Orion might be upsetting the Synapse team as development has ended and we are still commenting on the loss of this great application ( And maybe deep down living in hope that something will happen in some form of a re - coded Orion ) The bottom line is that this is a forum where we should be able to have intelligent, constructive and friendly conversations, even if some criticisms and personal opinions are made it is usually never made with a flamethrower on this forum.

My personal opinion on an alternative DAW to Orion is that there is none, Orion is one of a kind and it was designed for a simple musician like me to fire up and directly apply the musical idea that is in my head to it with great ease, again in my opinion the Orion piano roll is the best, i must admit that i have not tried Mulab but i have tried Reaper, it takes more mouse clicks than Orion to just load a vst instrument and hear it when you press a key on your controller keyboard and also you cannot change the grid size in the piano roll ( 32,24 etc.)

To get around my problematic Vst's (The Vst's are not faulty as they worked fine in Reaper) that cause Orion to crash and make the machine gun noise is to stream to WAV the performance of those plugins, use the WAV in an audio track then remove the plugin from the song, i must say that so far this is working nicely and my CPU load has gone down a lot for my tunes, this is the way that i have found to keep using Orion with modern Vst instruments as my brain is wired in a way that i can only connect with Orion and to me there is no alternative unless another DAW appears on the market with a very similar layout.

[heks]

Your completely right megawattt there is no immediate easy alternative to Orion I sometimes dream about winning the euro lottery big style and offering Synapse a ridiculous amount of mula to develope Orion 9,,oh dreams

[Teksonik]

Mark suggested using Image-Line's free Mini Host as a VSTi to "wrap" problematic plugins in Orion. I'm not going to bother with such workarounds but you might give it a try.

[megawattt]

Your completely right megawattt there is no immediate easy alternative to Orion I sometimes dream about winning the euro lottery big style and offering Synapse a ridiculous amount of mula to develope Orion 9,,oh dreams

Seriously I would do just that if i was financially loaded, i would crowdfund £100 now if Synapse did a crowdfund.

Mark suggested using Image-Line's free Mini Host as a VSTi to "wrap" problematic plugins in Orion. I'm not going to bother with such workarounds but you might give it a try.

Many thanks for the suggestion Teksonik, i will give that a try

[ThehakkeMadman]

I've been using (playing) with Caustic for Android, because it is very close to Orion but I never felt it could replace a DAW (Orion).
Just a few minutes ago I read that there's a desktop version of Caustic avaible, so I will check it out when I'm back home. Anyone here tested it so far?!

[Kriminal]

I've been using (playing) with Caustic for Android, because it is very close to Orion but I never felt it could replace a DAW (Orion).
Just a few minutes ago I read that there's a desktop version of Caustic avaible, so I will check it out when I'm back home. Anyone here tested it so far?!

Yes. It always been on PC. Last time i tried it it was quite small, wouldnt go full screen. Good app tho, but its not a host.

[ThehakkeMadman]

Hm looks like the desktop version has been out there quite a few years. That passed me by
But I'll check it out later, there is nothing I have to lose anymore

[ThehakkeMadman]

Now that I think about it: Orion isn't that great with external Midi gear so Caustic won't be any better here (as far as I read about Midi, Caustic is even worse) but the old school Orion users here should check it out.
If I like it, maybe I'll regularly "penetrate" its creator with my wishes and some other people here too, until Caustic becomes a full DAW...

[Teksonik]

I tried Caustic on PC in December:

I just tried Caustic. It had serious graphics performance issues on this system so I had to trash it.

[Andy-b]

I tried Caustic on PC in December:

I just tried Caustic. It had serious graphics performance issues on this system so I had to trash it.

Sadly the Caustic dev give up,so no more updates....

[Teksonik]

No sadness here. Caustic seemed rather toyish and poorly coded. Oh well I'm set for DAWs. It's just a matter of putting the time in to sculpt a workflow that is efficient and comfortable. I'm about 90% of the way, just have to tweak things a bit.

[walker]

Hello,

I forgot to say thank you for your replies and tips, thoughts and suggestions. I'll keep it in mind in my search for another software...

Best,
Anders

[bones]

I went through this a while ago but I couldn't find anything that comes close to Orion. So I am just going to keep using Orion. If a plugin won't work in it, I won't use that plugin (I pretty much stopped even looking at plugins 6 or 7 years ago, I have everything I could possibly want or need). But it's not like there aren't a million plugins around and most of them will work with Orion, so if one doesn't it should be easy to find something else to do the same job.