Acoustica Mixcraft 10.1 Recording Studio Build 587 Multilingual

Katfile | Clicknupload

You might be confusing this developer, Acoustica, with Acustica Audio.

Not sure if I need another DAW - Reaper seems to have everything I need, but I might check this one out just out of curiosity.

Mixcraft is a bit of a weird one when it comes to mixing down and rendering your projects.

If you put a reverb on say a 2 bar drum beat, when you render/mixdown you will get a 2bar + loop which contains the 'tail' of the reverb, so your 2 bar loop is now 2 bars long plus however long the tail of the reverb is. It's extremely annoying and confusing and it took me hours and hours of searching to figure out how to do this - just render out however many bars are contained within the loop - as it is in the DAW itself.

What you need to do is go to mix the file down by selecting the File>Mixdown To>Wav (I'm just using .wav as an example here but you can choose other formats).

Don't forget to use the "Edit Details" button if you want to change to 24bit or 16bit or whatever. Then you select the name of your file. Then you tick the "Use Selection" box.

But for this "Use Selection" box to be tickable, you have to have first selected with your mouse the exact range of the loop that you want to mix down by dragging across the screen from where you want it to start and then to finish. So my 2 bar loop for example will be pre-selected and then I won't get a 2 bar loop plus a reverb tail.

I think that if you select different tracks within that range, say you have the beat but you have some strings and some vocals as well, if you select them all then they will all render out, but if you just select the beat and the strings but not the vocals, then the render will be missing the vocals. At least I seem to remember that was how it works, it's not even as simple as selecting the loop range with the mouse, you have to select the loop range and the tracks that you want rendered. Anyway, whether it does this or not will be apparent when you try it and I'm sure you will be able to figure it out.

Yes, it's a totally nuts and inconvenient system if you just want to make some beats and render out a few bars. Of course if you are doing a full song then it's no problem, but most people will want to render out a few bars of their composition as they go along for a myriad of reasons.

I spent absolutely ages figuring all this out as this information is buried in their forum, although it may be in the manual - but that is where I found it. Quite a few people stumped by this stupid system and complaining about it.

So there is your answer - you have to select the range you want to render out then tick the "Use Selection" box after you have selected what type of file you want to render.

I just checked by the way and yes, you do have to select whichever tracks you want to render out apart from the range. So make sure you do have everything selected that you want to mix down and then to be sure listen back to the file that is rendered out (the wave file pops up in your selected default wave editor) just in case you got something wrong.

It's a tricky system and you need to pay attention. I guess the developer of Mixcraft didn't think that people would be using it for making up loops and beats. Which is a shame, because the pro version comes with a lot of very usable and nice loops and in quite a wide range of styles. And the way that you drag and drop in to the project is extremely well integrated and the beatmatching and tempo matching is done automatically. You can even alter how the beatmatching and tempo matching is done with a couple of different alternatives. It works very well.

The only other program that has such a counter intuitive rendering/mixing down paradigm is Zynewave's Podium. That is a great DAW (albeit unfinished and a bit buggy). There is even a very good free version of it. But you can't say, render out or mix down, say a 2 bar loop in the middle of your song, because there is just no way to do it. You have to bounce down within the daw and export, or something like that - it's been a while since I've used it.

Cakewalk also used to have a very unusual system but they have fixed that in the latest version by Bandlab - now it's just press a button - couldn't be easier.

I would also say that Studio One has a very unfriendly system as well if you just want to mix down some loops or beats. It's terrible file management and a real chore if you are using the DAW for knocking up beats quickly. Which of course the DAW is great at, but then they spoil it with all the extra steps you need to take.

For these reasons, Mixcraft and Podium and even Studio One are not DAWs that I use if I want to do this type of thing.

Hopefully this helps you. A lot of DAWs are lacking in this department, even Ableton Live is a bit of a chore, there is no "increment file name" like there is in Cubase and FLStudio. This automatically renumbers your file name to +1 of whatever it was. This is a great time save for when you want to knock up some quick beats. So ironically even though FLStudio is used a lot for this type of work (making beats) it turns out that the behemoth that is Cubase is actually pretty good and fast to use for the same type of use.

Don't let that put you off this DAW though. Mixcraft is great. I bought an old version of the program for a few quid and I upgraded in a sale so the pro version was not that expensive at all to buy. It's come a long way with the latest update. I have over a dozen DAWs that I use, but Mixcraft gets some use now and again when I feel like a change.

Hopefully the developer will implement a better mixdown system in the future.