This may be the simplest thing in the world to use if you want to record audio. Short of Audacity and Garage Band, of course. The truth is, Studio One was designed with one thing in mind: flow. And flow it does. You truly feel like your gliding over it when you first start, thanks a little to the graphical user interface. What is special about Studio One is that it operates the way you would expect a computer to operate, or rather the way a tablet would operate. The entire world of Studio One is drag and drop, and it is very refreshing to not have to learn a bunch of keyboard shortcuts to access rudimentary features that other digital audio workstation programs have buried underneath features they brought to the forefront for marketing purposes. Granted, they are useful, but they do not need to be in a user’s face.

SUITABILITY/PERFORMANCE

Studio One is a little light on features, I would admit, but it is a program in its infancy, and the goal of Studio One, remember, is to make music production elegant, and not a process or a labor. It should feel like you’re dancing over the DAW. There are a few things that should be addressed, but as far as the structure of the DAW goes, there is not a single other program that does things as intuitively as Studio One does, nor as quickly.

OVERALL OPINION

What blew me away was the quality of the built in plug ins. What was lacking were some actual plug ins; a de esser, for example, does not come with the program, but the reverb is unreal for a DAW plug. And the EQ feels incredibly solid. The best part about this program, however, is the mastering integration. This makes it possible to sit down and pound out a project, or a rough cut quickly. I love everything about Studio One, and now that the second version has come out, I can only cross my fingers and hope that they did not go the way of the bloated program.