Mixcraft 10.5 Recording Studio

I am an old Cubase user, but health and other issues kept me away from production for a few years and my old Cubase 7 is well redundant. I am not a professional musician, I like to create and experiment and try multiple genres just to scratch the creative itch.

Picked up Mixcraft 9 in a bundle on Humble (I think) a while back and having recently returned to production I thought I'd give it a go since upgrading my Cubase is well out of my current budget (mostly retired disabled pensioner).

Since learning the ins and outs I recently upgraded to 10 with a very budget friendly price.

Mixcraft is very intuitive to use, especially if one has experience in other DAWs as familiar tools are in familiar places. I have never had to refer to the manual and any confusion as to where, what or how I may have had was solved with a quick search. Answers to issues seem fast to find so while I am not an active part of any community, support from users seems to be out there. I have struggled with learning some other software I have trialled and Mixcraft seemed the easier of the lot.

I have an old collection of Native Instruments tools, bought Komplete...err...5(?) years ago and all those amazing synths such as Massive, Absynth and my beloved Battery all work flawlessly. So do my U-he products. 64-bit Supported.

On my system 10 feels a little heavier than 9 and performance in loading projects and swapping/adding VST effects on the fly does not seem as smooth as it did in 9. I feel the same on the laptop I also run it on, but it is well workable and does not slow down the actual process of production at all but is there reason for the dropped star for this review. 10's improvements over 9 are nice, I won't list them here.

I have a muti-monitor setup of four screens and being able to undock windows such as the mixer and sound/sample library to a separate screen is great.

I am a terrible mixer/engineer but I am well happy with the result I am able to get out of this software.

For budget minded people or enthusiasts looking to dip their digital toes, Mixcraft is a solid professional easy to learn product and at a price point that many competitors only offer severely cut down and limited applications..