I must confess, I never really used PreSonus Studio One [Tape Op #154]. While many of my friends are among its enthusiastic users, I was never able to find a place for it amongst my already crowded selection of DAWs. My workflow tends to look like this: Steinberg Cubase for film scoring (or Apple Logic or MOTU Digital Performer, if the job requires it); Avid Pro Tools for recording, mixing, and music editing; Ableton Live for what it does best; and Cockos Reaper for game audio and experimenting with extending its capabilities via its API (application programming interface). My needs are met, albeit scattered. I'd checked out the demo version of Studio One every few releases (version 5 was the last one I tried), but it never really clicked with me. My impression was always that it was like an amalgamation of Cubase and Logic. This isn't necessarily a bad thing – DAWs borrow features from one another all the time – but the lack of what felt like a unique identity kept me from diving into it beyond basic curiosity.
Fender has since acquired the PreSonus brand, and while the live sound and studio monitor products remain PreSonus by name, recording-specific software and hardware is being released under the new Fender Studio brand. In this review, I'll be attempting to let go of my previous impressions and take the rebrand as an opportunity to look at this DAW with fresh eyes.
Upon startup, I was greeted with one of the better implementations of a "hub" app that I've seen. It's tightly integrated with recent projects and audio interface settings, online features, and a news feed. Rather than being a separate window, it's always a click away via the Home button near the top-right corner of any project – I like that! Despite my aforementioned large collection of DAWs, my "home" (to the extent that I have one) is Cubase, and Studio Pro 8 feels very familiar. But unlike my previous impressions of Studio One, it feels less "ripped off" and more an adoption of what are simply good DAW design decisions that just happened to be (as far as I'm aware) first introduced in Cubase, all thoughtfully evolved with Studio Pro's ever-present focus on balancing information density with ease of use.
Moving from left to right: The Track List filters and search are powerful and provide quick and easy schemes for dealing with high track counts; being able to optionally view Groups and Scenes (a great feature – more on this later) is a smart decision. It's information-dense, but approachable. The Inspector is similar in that the interface gives a lot of control without being overwhelming. It offers enough functionality that one can choose to approach it from a "maximalist" position, making the Inspector the place that one looks for most track- and region-based functions; or one can hide some of its features, focusing its purpose into whatever one feels an Inspector should be used for. The primary window is clean but powerful and, once again, pretty Cubase-ish – but again, not in a bad way. I've always felt that Cubase arrived at certain design decisions by reasoning from first principles, similar to how "Leo Fender got it right the first time" with regard to the design of the Telecaster. As a result, I've no complaints here – it "just works" and feels good to jump in with right away.
Bonus points for the Info View, which elegantly solves the problem of feature discovery by showing a context-aware selection of actions depending on where your mouse is; actions that correspond to one or more modifier keys are highlighted when their respective modifier keys are held down. This really makes finding what you can do in any particular part of the interface a joy and will probably help counteract the sense of overwhelm that novices to DAWs might face. This is something I'm passionate about, as attempts to make DAWs more approachable too often result in simply dumbing their feature sets down to an unacceptable low, hurting the professional for the sake of the beginner. Features like Info View allow the DAW to remain a powerful choice for professionals while still offering a gentle learning curve for beginners. Smart.
The Editor (i.e., the piano roll) is similarly Cubase-ish. Working in it was natural and intuitive, with all the MIDI editing tools and features obvious and easily within reach. The fact that it offers multiple CC (continuous controller) lanes – a must in my book – is a huge plus.