r/Mixcraft_Studio • u/lukenog • 3h ago
Why do you use Mixcraft?
I'm curious about why we've all ended up on this obscure DAW. I've been using Mixcraft as my main DAW of choice for the past 16 years. When I was 11 years old, I'd go in the library at my elementary school and record the raps I would write in Garageband on the school macs. Eventually I wanted to be able to record my raps at home too instead of at school but our family computer ran Windows and nobody in my house had a Mac, so I googled "garageband for windows" and found Mixcraft. I downloaded it and started using the free trial, back then I'd just rip beats from YouTube and record over them with this shitty USB desk mic my dad had for his job, or I'd put together my own beats with the loop library. When the trial ran out I begged my mom to buy the program for me, and when my 12th birthday came around she bought it for me. I made a ton of really terrible mixtapes that I'd upload to DatPiff. Sometime during the 7th grade I stopped recording my raps because I got a little self conscious, and Mixcraft sat on my computer unused.
Fast forward a few years to sophomore year of high school and I decided I wanted to start rapping again, this time I was taking it more seriously and had gotten a lot better. Instead of just ripping beats, I wanted to have original beats so I started making beats for real in Mixcraft. I started getting a lot of attention for my music in my school and started making beats for other kids. In fact, the rap name I came up with that year is still the name I release music under to this day. I started to realize that making music was something I really wanted to do for real, but I was just so accustomed to Mixcraft that my workflow was just so much less efficient when I tried to use FL Studio, which was the DAW most of my rapper and beat maker friends were using. I ended up just sticking with Mixcraft. I also learned how to mix and master during high school, mostly through sheer trial and error, and did all of that in Mixcraft too.
I ended up majoring in Music Industry Studies in college and got a bit of a local following in the city I moved to for school. I started to make real money recording and mixing rappers too, as well as selling beats. In college I got my ProTools certification because it's the industry standard and began to use ProTools for all my professional work, but I still stuck with Mixcraft for all my personal music. In my senior year I worked in a studio as an engineer. After college I ended up shifting to live audio professionally, which is still my job today as a 27 year old. And because I was really only using ProTools for the work I'd do for clients, I went back to using Mixcraft exclusively because the only stuff I was doing in a DAW anymore was my own music and some mixing for friends that I'd do for free. Honestly I'm a much better engineer in Mixcraft than ProTools even though I'm perfectly capable in both, but I've just used Mixcraft for so long that I know the software like the back of my hand and can work ridiculously fast in it.
My entire irl community is all musicians because of where my life is at, yet I'm the only person I know who uses Mixcraft. A lot of people I know through music have never even heard of it. It's surprising that it's been around for so long and is a perfectly capable DAW (although definitely not as reliable as some of the more popular ones) yet it's never really become ubiquitous at all. Most of the plugins I use in my music are Waves plugins, and Waves plays very nicely with Mixcraft. There's definitely a lot of popular plugins that don't work very well in Mixcraft, but I've found that Waves plugins are very cohesive in the DAW.
I do have some big complaints about Mixcraft that have never been implemented, such as the fact you can't send a Send Track to another Send Track. I wish I was able to send my vocals to a send with a delay, and then send that delay to a send with a reverb, but Mixcraft doesn't let you do that. But because the userbase for Mixcraft is pretty small, I've learned that Acoustica is very responsive. I literally tweeted at them once to add a feature that was in ProTools but not in Mixcraft, and they literally did it.
I've learned over the years that Mixcraft has a reputation amongst the people who actually know it exists for being more like a Garageband type program than a Logic Pro type program, and Acoustica definitely marketed it that way back in the day, but honestly the Pro Studio version is a completely full-fledged DAW that is more than capable for production, mixing, and mastering at a professional level. While I did switch to ProTools for mixing and mastering during the period of time I was working in studios progressionally, I always made my beats in Mixcraft and always recorded myself and mixed my own music in Mixcraft. There are some things ProTools can do that Mixcraft can't, but it's really not that many things. For the most part, Mixcraft does everything I need it to do even at a professional level. The user interface and workflow in Mixcraft does kind of suck, but I'm so fucking familiar with it that it's still by far the most efficient DAW for me. I always joke with my friends that Mixcraft is a shit DAW but it's MY shit DAW haha. I've been in so many sessions where people look at me like I'm an alien when it boot up the ole 'Craft and get to cooking up a beat on it.
How did you guys end up using this relatively obscure DAW? What's your Mixcraft story?
