The Best 11 DAW's that are either FREE or under $90!

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My top 11 suggestions for Free / highly affordable Digital Audio Workstation software.

I've had the good fortune over the last six months to play with a lot of different audio software on a couple of projects and I thought it might help people to share my top 11 suggestions for Free / highly affordable Digital Audio Workstation software. (DAW's)

So if you are a Pro-Tools, Logic or Studio One victim and are forced to use those tools for your daily work...

LOOK AWAY NOW.

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These fully featured DAW's cost a mere fraction of what you are paying and have sleeker design, better engines, greater stability and an open architecture that allows a full range of external 3rd party VSTs.

1. Reaper.
   
   https://www.reaper.fm/
   
   Free for two months then you pay something like $60 but they let you keep using it if you can't afford that.
   
   It's the most powerful DAW out there and has super low latency and is written on lightning fast lightweight code.
   
   It easily competes with very expensive packages like Presonus Studio One or ProTools in terms of performance, and it has a huge function set. It's the best low cost DAW there is and it comes with hundreds of great VSTs, unlimited tracks, video editing - tons of good stuff.
   
   It has an open VST architecture so you can use 3rd Party VSTs.

2. Audacity.
   
   http://www.audacityteam.org/
   
   Free and very useful.
   I wouldn't use Audacity for mixing much because Reaper is just so good but Audacity is great for pulling in audio and cleaning it up, and for audio capture and logging takes.
   
   A lot of Radio Journalists use it for producing radio shows.
   
   It has an open VST architecture so you can use 3rd Party VSTs.
   
   

3. LMMS
   
   https://lmms.io/
   
   A free and open source DAW a bit like Fruity Loops.
   
   Very easy to use and a lot of fun to play with.
   
   LMMS also has an open VST architecture.
   
   

4. Tracktion T6
   
   
   https://www.tracktion.com/
   
   T7 is about $200 but T6 is free and it's a pretty competent DAW.
   It has an open VST architecture.

5. Adobe Audition
   
   (Part of the Creative Suite)
   
   Audition is probably the best clean up / pre-mastering tool for Audio. It's great for doing Compression, EQ-ing, Balancing, Pitch Shifting, Noise and Hiss reduction and hundreds of other features.
   
   Audition doesn't have an open VST architecture (well sort of does but very limited) so you just work with the tools it which has, but they are pretty extensive.

6. Podium Zynewave
   
   https://zynewave.com/
   
   Zynewave costs $50 for the full DAW, and comes with free VSTs, unlimited tracks, and has an open VST architecture.
   
   There's also a freeware version which only has a couple of features disabled.
   
   Zynewave has a reputation for great stability and people who like it's workflow love it.
   
   I find it counter intuitive to use compared to Reaper (Reaper is the most elegant interface on this list) but there are a lot of indie mixers and producers who love it.
   
   

7. OHM Studio
   
   https://www.ohmstudio.com/
   
   OHM Studio is a DAW built to provide a live and fluid DAW environment for collaboration.
   
   So if you are a Singer you can put your parts in, and a Mixer in another country or just down the road has the same timeline and can do his stuff, and each of the Musicians; Guitars, Drums etc can also do their parts at home and it's all one project. I really want to test it out on an album project. So if you found other Steemit artists for example who wanted to collaborate with you you could work together potentially without distance or individual schedules & commitments being a problem.

8. Presonus Studio One Prime
   
   https://shop.presonus.com
   
   I guess I have to mention Studio One's free version because it's free, but unlike the other DAW's here it locks you into their more expensive versions and their internal upgrade path and doesn't have an open VST architecture so it's only good if you want to get locked into going down that path.
   
   It also has really limited tracks ( I think 16 ) whereas Reaper, Zyewave Podium, Mixcraft etc. are fully unlimited. So Studio One is great software but personally I'd rather shoot myself in the head when you have tools like Reaper that are essentially a lot more powerful because they are elegant, light-weight, don't bog down and have full open architectures.

9. MiXXX
   
   https://www.mixxx.org/
   
   
   MiXXX is free DJ and mixing software that allows DJ's and radio hosts beatmixing, BPM Detection and seamless syncing of Songs. It has a super fast mixing engine and works with virtually every audio format. Mixxx also allows Shoutcast Broadcasting.

10. Single Cell's Caustic
    
    http://www.singlecellsoftware.com/caustic
    
    Caustic has a free version for Windows users.
    
    Caustic is a very different DAW. It is based on a rack mount synthesiser stack design where the user creates a "rack" of up to 14 machines to create music. It has a ton of cool Synths with thousands of presets all of which can be wired together in multiple ways.
    
    The Syths are: SubSynth; PCM Synth; BassLine; BeatBox; PadSynth; 8BitSynth; Modular; Organ; Vocoder; FM Synth; KSSynth; SawSynth. It also has an effects rack; a mixer desk with global delay and reverb effects; a mastering section with a parametric EQ; and a Song Sequencer.

11. Mixcraft.
    
    
    http://www.acoustica.com/mixcraft/
    
    Costs around $50 for the starter version and $89 for the more useful version but it allows you to use third party VST's and has an open architecture and it's engine is nearly as clean and fast as Reaper's is.
    
    A lot of people in the ProTools, Cubase, Studio One spectrum knock Mixcraft but it's very similar to Sony Acid and it is hands-down the fastest way to make music if you don't want to get bogged down in a technical interface. You can get tracks produced in it in a couple of hours and for lots of musicians who are non-technical from the engineering aspect and who just sing or play guitar it's definitely the best package on this list. It's the one you'll easily produce three or four songs a week with.
    
    It also comes bundled with a ton of samples and instruments too, and has great drag and drop quantizing and matching features where you can just drop two tracks on top of each other and it will work out how to match them exactly. Which is great for beat matching.
    
    I wouldn't use it for cleaning up tracks (Adobe Audition is way better at that) but if you just want to scan in your old 45 tracks and then maybe re-match them and have a good time playing with remixing them, then it's an awesome tool and you'll get lost very quickly in lots of great sounding variations.
    
    Its the only software on this list that you can literally be up and running and producing stuff in in about 30 mins, and everything it outputs also actually sounds really good. MixCraft's stability and speed match Reaper and it doesn't bloat and bog down the way that legacy bloatware DAW's like Protools does.

12. My absolute most favorite music software ever. (Drum Roll)

Renoise.

https://www.renoise.com/

Renoise is a tracker, not a timeline based DAW and it looks completely nuts when you open it, but if you are into really interesting experimental sound track stuff it's just so much fun.

If you find you are getting addicted to Steemit then Renoise is your addiction killer. However then you'll have to use Steemit to pull yourself out of Renoise.

If I had the choice of a two week paid holiday in a Tahitian resort or a peaceful two weeks with no kid or work distractions where I could just play with Renoise then I'd take the two weeks with Renoise. It costs about $80 but it's the best money you'll ever spend.

You can download and check it out for free.

Check out some of John Frusciante's Renoise tracks for some examples of what it can do in the right hands!

Just fair warning when you first load it it's a mindtrip and you have to watch the Renoise tutorials, but they are good and once you get about an hour in it's actually one of the easiest interfaces to use.

Renoise has an inbuilt sampler lets you take any note into thousand of variations of effect.

So you can build a Phillip Glass landscape out of a single note in Renoise if you like. It also has a VST called Redux which you can use inside any open architecture DAW (such as Reaper) which is like a compressed and super-tight version of Renoise itself.

Enjoy, and I look forward to hearing your Masterpiece on the @msp-waves radio soon!

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@teamaustralia

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