Recs wanted for DAWs and Interface for older 15+ year old PC

[joshuatxuk]

So I'll try to keep this succint. 

I have a early 2000s era PC with Windows XP I inherited and want to make music with it. Since I'll be mostly be doing plunderphonics oriented loop and beat scene stuff, mostly using old tape decks and players, so I don't need anything fancy. I had a copy of Ableton I got second hand but never did much with it. I had garage band and Rebirth in the past but using those is not an option. I want to try to minimize my setup and stick with familiarity which includes using my Tascam TL-122S

So I'm looking for the following immediately:

- An equivalent to this as an audio interface: Tascam Us-122l USB 2.0 Audio/MIDI Computer Interface. I use mine now for my tape dubbing and digitizing setup and instead of splurging on a second used one I would like recs for something similar, ideally <$100. 

- Any free DAW or sequencer (beyond a .wav editor like Audacity) that can run on a Windows XP with 1.6 ghz / 3.24 gb RAM. Reaper and Cakewalk come to mind but it seems overkill. 

Not urgent but ideal:

- Cheap but effective monitors. I have Audio-Technica ATH-M50s so something in that niche. 

- I have an Alesis Q25 but open to any MIDI pad of similar price point.

I'm also asking this because I'm so out of the loop but have an itch to start recording and making music lately.

[exitonly]

Logic 4.8

[ignatius]

audiomulch will run on XP if you want some higher level modular type audio beat making things that are deceptively simple. 

live 4 i think will run on XP. as well as steinberg Cubasis which is really cheap and probably some free version you can find on line somewhere. I have a laptop that runs on XP and three's a whole bunch of stuff on there.. free plug ins that no longer exist etc. 

today or tomorrow i might have time to fire it up and see what's what.

i'll come back to this post asap. 

[Cryptowen]

I've been using Jeskola Buzz since 2004 & haven't ever bothered updating it. It has been a pillar of stability

[joshuatxuk]

59 minutes ago, nikisoko said:

Logic 4.8

on Windows? I didn't consider Logic but now I'm curious

18 minutes ago, Cryptowen said:

I've been using Jeskola Buzz since 2004 & haven't ever bothered updating it. It has been a pillar of stability

is it a tracker? I've seen it mentioned (Field uses it) but no little about it

[Cryptowen]

9 minutes ago, joshuatxuk said:

is it a tracker? I've seen it mentioned (Field uses it) but no little about it

it's a barebones opensource DAW that was developed back in the late 90s. it has a tracker, a wavetable, a note entry screen that looks like microsoft excel, and a little virtual module bay where you can chain machines & fx together however you want. i rly like it because it's so minimal (although keep in mind i've been using it for over half my life at this point so it's very intuitive. a lot of ppl say it seems kind of opaque at first). there were a lot of people developing extensions for it back in the 00s. dunno if that scene is really active much any more, but you can still get a lot of the nifty peer material easily enough online

[thawkins]

Reaper is going to work for this too probably.

[YEK]

Cool edit will work!

[modey]

Another vote for Buzz. I used it pretty much exclusively for 10 years, it's great.

[EXTRASUPER81]

2 hours ago, thawkins said:

Reaper is going to work for this too probably.

Reaper works on Linux under Wine perfectly by accounts so I would have thought so.

I mean, if it doesn't work on WinXP you could always install Ubuntu (or whatever) and run it on that.

[ignatius]

chris randall has 2 old computers running w/all kinds of shit as a project. might be interesting and have some leads. 

 

[TubularCorporation]

Reaper's probably lighter weight than a lot of DAWs that were actually made for hardware that old.  I'm running it on a 10 year old computer and I still haven't felt any need to upgrade.

Also The CS-2 era version of Adobe Audition/Cool Edit Pro is still grey-area free.

 

EDIT: actually they took down the download links finally, never mind.

Edited January 26, 2021 by TubularCorporation

[auxien]

3 hours ago, ignatius said:

audiomulch will run on XP if you want some higher level modular type audio beat making things that are deceptively simple. 

second that rec. used Audiomulch for years, there's a lot of depth if you want or it can be very straightforward for relatively simple and quick things (once you get the hang of it of course)

re: the plunderphonics lean of the project, Girl Talk was promoted as using it years ago, he did a lot that's very much based on manipulating others' music so there might be some techniques mentioned in the videos here....that said, these videos are old so maybe there's newer stuff but...anyway. besides that i can attest that AM is good for taking in some samples and fucccin with em hard. 

http://www.audiomulch.com/articles/interview-with-girl-talk

[sweepstakes]

29 minutes ago, EXTRASUPER81 said:

Reaper works on Linux under Wine perfectly by accounts so I would have thought so.

No need for Wine - reaper.fm provides "experimental builds" but they work just as well as the Windows ones.

Renoise will probably also work well on an older machine, although I'd probably advise using an older version for that, which your license may or may not permit.

Haven't used Buzz for years, but it was the shit back in the day.

[TubularCorporation]

Sunvox runs on anything.

 

 

[joshuatxuk]

3 hours ago, yekker said:

Cool edit will work!

I remember awepittance touting an old ass version of this because of it's weird editing options

[joshuatxuk]

3 hours ago, auxien said:

second that rec. used Audiomulch for years, there's a lot of depth if you want or it can be very straightforward for relatively simple and quick things (once you get the hang of it of course)

re: the plunderphonics lean of the project, Girl Talk was promoted as using it years ago, he did a lot that's very much based on manipulating others' music so there might be some techniques mentioned in the videos here....that said, these videos are old so maybe there's newer stuff but...anyway. besides that i can attest that AM is good for taking in some samples and fucccin with em hard. 

http://www.audiomulch.com/articles/interview-with-girl-talk

Yeah I suppose plunderphonics was a bit too misleading but this is helpful, reminds me of how 0PN used goldwave for eccojams.

I want to make 1991 and Odd Nosdam sounding stuff. Lo-fi house / techno overall as well. I think the former just uses DAWs and the latter is def a MPC sampler user. Burial is def an inspiration ethos wise, IIRC he was using some Adobe program? 

I think I'm sold on Reaper for now, I can play around with VSTs too with that option. I have a hard drive of various free drum machine and MPC percussion .wavs to lean on. My plan is to sample audio and loop breaks from cassette tapes with my Sony decks with pitch control (+/- 30%) and likewise use tape to both "dirty up" any synth lines I come up with before re-recording it back into a mix. 

Anyway I have a specific plan for at least two songs in terms of exact samples to loop and melodies to layer so this helps a lot. I want to get this started quick and dirty with a setup that is not daunting in terms of learning curve nor price.

[joshuatxuk]

I revisited this list, offhand Ardour stands out but the rest seem obscure or Linux based. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_free_software_for_audio

[EXTRASUPER81]

3 hours ago, joshuatxuk said:

I want to get this started quick and dirty with a setup that is not daunting in terms of learning curve nor price.

If Reaper works you won't go far wrong - coming from any other DAW to it won't be jarring. I went from being a long time Cubase user to it with zero regrets, straight away it was comfortable and intuitive. Recommended without reservation.

Fwiw, when I was doing stuff with DAWs it was mostly doing things that you could, in theory at least (like insanely labour intensively) do using tape - mainly cutting truncating and pitch shifting, using the timeline as a sample arranger - and Reaper was great for this. Haven't done any music in ages (building headphones has been my main creative outlet for the last couple of years) but always telling myself I'll get back to it.

[EXTRASUPER81]

I also appreciate Reaper's 'Guiltware' business model - after a month of use it's still free to use, but when you open it it has a pop up which basically says, come on, don't be a dick, it's only £40 for a lifetime license.

[mcbpete]

6 hours ago, joshuatxuk said:

I remember awepittance touting an old ass version of this because of it's weird editing options

Yeah any version of Cool Edit up to Adobe Audition v1.5 has all the old (imo better, in so far as musically more interesting) algos for noise reduction, pitch & time stretching etc. 

[TubularCorporation]

2 hours ago, mcbpete said:

Yeah any version of Cool Edit up to Adobe Audition v1.5 has all the old (imo better, in so far as musically more interesting) algos for noise reduction, pitch & time stretching etc. 

Sound Forge 4.5 and earlier has some really musically interesting time stretch, too.  Not sure how much longer they kept it after the Sony buyout but I used to mke entire tracks by jus tstretching out, say, a single snare hit to 4 or 5 minutes in Sound Forge 4 and then building up around that.

[joshuatxuk]

6 hours ago, EXTRASUPER81 said:

I also appreciate Reaper's 'Guiltware' business model - after a month of use it's still free to use, but when you open it it has a pop up which basically says, come on, don't be a dick, it's only £40 for a lifetime license.

Yeah that's a stupid affordable price and about the most generous trial setup I know of.

[purlieu]

If you want a turn-of-the-century version of Fruityloops when it was just making loops from one-shot samples (plus VSTis) I have a cracked copy somewhere. All my early stuff was done on it and as long as you don't use their built-in samples it's actually very good for rhythmic, loop-based stuff.

[TubularCorporation]

21 hours ago, joshuatxuk said:

Yeah that's a stupid affordable price and about the most generous trial setup I know of.

It's not a lifetime license though, it covers two full versions worth of updates.  I registered in I think 2015 (after about 1000 hours in demo mode) when v.5 came out. v.6 came out last year.  So at that rate it's more like an 8-10 year license.