Music editing software

I’d say ableton is easily the best as syncing, quantizing and warping is at the the very core of the software’s design, plus you get the added bonus of it being an incredibly powerful music production suite to incorporate synth’s and effects.

Next would be mixmiester. It is incredibly easy to extend sections of songs, incorporate automated effects in the timeline, and create mashups using different songs as you get 4 tracks to play with. Mixmiester is great for this type of thing as it has excellent bpm detection and has key detection aswell.

VDJ8 will have a timeline function very similar to mixmiester but i would imagine it will be more powerful at creating automations.

Garageband or Audacity are both capable of doing what you want for free, so I would start there, sink at least 15-20 hours into one of them before you even think about upgrading, so that you know exactly what tools you need above the basic stuff. Once you know what those programs can’t do, then you can start looking at the more featured DAWs.

If you’re a windows user, then check out Fruity Loops, it’s one of the most astonishing pieces of free software ever made, and people have made millions (Literally) with productions coming out of it. However, being free, it does lack features, and in order to make productions of the kind that many people get out of it, you have to buy (or steal if you’re Avicii :P) expensive plugins.

If you’re on a mac, there isn’t really a cost free upgrade path, with Reason, Logic and Ableton all amazing programs that can fulfil most of your needs. Reason is great for a dynamic workflow with a quick start due to the astonishing number of instruments included, however, mastering Reason can take some time, as complex patching is required. Logic is a professional piece of equipment, and probably a logical path if you’ve spent some time in garageband, it’s great for getting things to audiophilic precision and for polishing, however, it can be a bit dense when you first approach it. Ableton Live is the logical stop for a DJ, it’s set up so that things can be chopped up and synced to a beat really fast, but the included instruments in Live leave many people unsatisfied. It can also be hard to get a handle on the workflow of the software when starting out.

Both Ableton and Reason are cross platform applications.

I’m personally an Ableton Live user, although I’m thinking about incorporating Reason into my setup.

If you’re not looking for such in depth programs, although I’d recommend learning one of the above in case you decide to get into production, then the programs mentioned above, mixmeister and (possibly) Virtual DJ 8 will suit you just fine.

backtothefront, post: 23148, member: 1433 wrote: This, exactly, very well explained. Totally agree, Audacity is a great program, I use it to extract/breakdown large bits of audio and with a little effort you can create/edit all the loops/audio you want to in it.

Just realised I needed to tweak my signature to update Reason to 6.5 – Rack Extensions – VSTs in the Reason world. Also you can link Reason to Ableton (and other DAWs) via ReWire so they will talk to each other in a way.