The New King Of Music Production Software?

There's an interesting new chart (seen on the left) making its way around the Internet from Digital Music Doctor that shows the popularity of both Sonar and Cubase exceeding Pro Tools for the first time during the first quarter of 2011. Both Sonar and Cubase are great pieces of software and have quite a large installed base that I'm sure is growing, but there's a flaw in this DAW hysteria.

Digital Music Doctor doesn't measure the installed base of users or even sales of software packages, they measure Internet search results. This is like saying that Rebecca Black should be on the top of the sales charts based on her Internet popularity, when we know that those numbers have nothing to do with actual sales (which are dismal despite nearly 200 million YouTube views).

I'm no shill for Pro Tools but I can tell you that if you really want to work professionally in just about any area of the entertainment business, knowing how to use it is a necessity because that's what the majority of pros use. From music production to film and television post to voice-over work to anything else you can think of, it's a Pro Tools world for the most part. That's not to say that any of the other fine DAWs don't have their place. They're great learning and production tools, every one of them. But if you're looking for a job that has to do with audio, you'll need some Pro Tools operational skill no matter which way you cut it.

This comes from a person who started with Digital Performer version 1.0, then switched to Nuendo 1.0 (which I loved), only to go kicking and screaming into the Pro Tools world after it became just too painful transferring projects back and forth to those other platforms. I've never looked back and my projects never suffered from the change. So just a word of warning when looking at software popularity charts; they don't always tell the whole story.

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Music Software Popularity

The second Music Software Popularity Index for the second quarter of 2009 has arrived from the Digital Doctor website. The ten most popular music software products, based on recent search engine activity, are:

PRODUCT (INDEX)
1. DigiDesign Pro Tools (13.3)
2. Steinberg Cubase (10.2)
3. FL Studio (8.3)
4. Cakewalk Sonar (7.1)
5. Apple Logic (4.5)
6. Adobe Audition (3.8)
7. Ableton Live (3.5)
8. Apple GarageBand (3.3)
9. Sony Sound Forge (2.9)
10. Sony Acid (2.8)
11. Band-In-A-Box

12. MOTU Digital Prformer

13. Propellerhead Reason

14. Steinberg Wavelab

15. Steinberg Nuendo

This index is based on quarterly Internet search activity on Google, Yahoo, AOL and MSN. Collectively these 4 search engines represent more than 95% of the searches on the Internet. Over 100 search terms are used to construct this index, and 15 music software products are tracked. An annual average of the past four quarters is also included for comparison.

I've used a lot of these software packages myself. I was a Digital Performer user from version 1.0 until I switched to version 1.0 of Nuendo. Played around with Cubase, Logic and Reason for a while, and actually did a few television cues in GarageBand. Recently got into using Ableton Live a bit too.

But after many years of trying to avoid Pro Tools, I finally gave in 3 or 4 years ago and never looked back. Pro Tools is the de facto standard in just about every major studio, every professional audio production, and every post house. It's cheap and easy to get into, and with version 8, it's assimilated the best parts of virtually every other DAW out there, not to mention rock solid in function (I never had a crash yet).

Although it's great to have competition in the marketplace, if you want to work in pro situations, you have to be well-versed in Pro Tools.

Additional details are available at the Digital Music Doctor website.