Studio One V2: More than worth the wait.

The new StudioOne Pro V2 (S1ProV2) has been released. No doubt you’ve heard the buzz around the integration of Melodyne’s Audio Random Access (ARA) technology and seen some of the videos. (If you have not, click here and here.) The possibilities are mind boggling.

The new tech aside, the real draw of StudioOne for me is the focus on efficient, logical workflow. What do I mean by that?

• The visual GUI is easily understood so you have a decent chance of figuring out how to do something quickly.
• Likewise, the logical organization of the application’s features, menus, interaction paradigms and conventions are consistent.
• The software tries to take care of the drudgery. When you work with S1Pro, you really get the feeling that the designers asked the question: “Why should folks have to (fill in some repetitive task)? Let’s have the software take care of this and give people a chance to tweak the results”. The new multi-track drum editing workflow is a good example of this, but other examples – some little, some big – abound in the software.
• Drag and drop…damn near everything almost anywhere. The application is smart enough to figure out what you are trying to do from the context.
• Not so much a part of workflow, but an important “effectiveness multiplier,” is the ARA stuff. This goes way beyond existing implementations of pitch correction in the likes of DP, LOGIC, or Cubase. (Check out the above videos on the Presonus and Celemony sites.)

The workflow and the ease of “grokking” the software combine into THE major benefit from my perspective: I can achieve higher proficiency with the software more quickly and with less investment in time. This is incredibly important to me as I don’t do this stuff 24/7 and have limited time to invest in things not related to the day job and family. Not having to re-learn my way around something if I step away from it for a week or two IS HUGE. It has been THE stumbling block for me and many other very capable packages (DP, CUBASE, REAPER). With StudioOne, I can be almost immediately focused on the music, not some obscure key command or menu or wonky workflow. And this is not because the program is limited or dummied down.

It’s just well designed, thoughtful, and thoroughly modern.

(Now if only the would play around with the GUI palette just a touch….)

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