I've been reading up on remixing songs and was wondering if anyone has played around with any of the PC studios? Cubase is popylar, Samplitude, Acid, Cakewalk, Gigastudio - they all seem to do the same thing, some more than others. I know I'll have to chop up some songs and create my own loops and what not (although I was lucky enough to get the "parts" from an Assemblage 23 song, so that makes it easier!), but just wondering what might be a good basic program to get the hang of, and say 6mo-year down the road move up to one of the big boys. Any ideas?

(Crossposting to Gothgeek too, dunno which is the most appropriate area!)

I'm rather fond of Propellerhead's Reason. It's pretty much a virtual rack with an infinite amount of space, and tons of software gear to load into it. Check out http://www.propellerhead.se - they have full-featured demo versions.
As far as moving into the profesional world with it, according to an artical on their site, the upcoming Prodigy album was done entirely in Reason.

Cool, thanks for the tip, checking it out now!

You can force yourself with Audition from Adobe... It is basically a multitrack editor... it uses dirext x plug-ins for effects. But it is a very powerful editor and is ideal for manual sequencing and cutting up your own bits and pieces. Welcome to the world of the remix, or as I like to call it, the aural sigil.

If you want something good to start out with, that's easy to learn and can handle most anything you would want to do, you might want to look into Sony (formerly Sonic Foundry) Acid. You'll probably want to get the pro version (as it includes midi sequencing and stuff). It's fairly inexpensive and is very well supported. It's a great 'stepping-stone' to the more advanced programs later on (like Cubase, Sonar, Logic Audio, Pro-Tools, etc.).

Nephilim wrote:If you want something good to start out with, that's easy to learn and can handle most anything you would want to do, you might want to look into Sony (formerly Sonic Foundry) Acid. You'll probably want to get the pro version (as it includes midi sequencing and stuff). It's fairly inexpensive and is very well supported. It's a great 'stepping-stone' to the more advanced programs later on (like Cubase, Sonar, Logic Audio, Pro-Tools, etc.).

Along the same line of goodies, Soundforge is fun to play with, too.

There's always Fruity Loops too, which isn't just for beatmixing anymore....or ProTools if you have gobs of cash you just need to spend.

If you have the hardware (MIDI and MMC based control surface and / or decent soundcard) and time the following Open Source Projects are used for Audio projects all around the world.

AGNULA
http://www.agnula.org/
Has a live CD version, based on Debian or RedHat

dyne:bolic
http://www.dynebolic.org/
Has a live CD version (the first one for Audio actually)

Planet CCRMA
http://ccrma.stanford.edu/planetccrma/software/
Probably the first open source audion distribution, uses RedHat/Fedora

Anyone willing to work with me on these let me know by email. I am in the process of setting up a testing lab for AGNULA/Debian.