Perpetual license: $200 / £170
Perpetual license with Pro+ Plan: $180 / £160 per year
Pro+ monthly plan: $20 / £17 per month
Upgrade from any previous version: $150 / £135
presonus.com
First appearing in 2009, Studio One is a relative newcomer to the DAW scene compared to older names — Cubase, FL Studio, and Reason, for example. But its heritage is solid, its creators having worked on developing flagship products for Steinberg, including Cubase and Nuendo.
While PreSonus’ line-up includes many studio hardware products, this software is far from an afterthought. Rather, it’s a highly capable music production suite which deserves a wider audience, despite shortcomings. But in a crowded field, does it do enough to capture your attention?
For those unfamiliar with Studio One, it’s an end-to-end music production environment that runs on macOS, Windows and Linux, and covers almost every part of the process from recording and programming to arranging, editing, mixing and mastering. Its feature set is broadly comparable with Cubase or Logic Pro, even if it approaches some tasks differently, in that it’s a more conventional DAW as opposed to, say, Ableton Live or Reason, which have their own workflows.
Studio One has a lot of ‘stuff’ in it, especially if you go for the Pro+ version with all the extra content, and this can initially feel a little overwhelming. On installation, you are asked to choose which of the various sound sets and packs to install – the DAW’s eight virtual instruments largely act as containers for sound sets in the form of samplers and drum machines, plus there are some soft synths as well. There’s not the sheer breadth of instruments you get with Logic (around 25) or the pricier Ableton Live Suite (20), but of course, third-party VST, AAX and CLAP plugins are supported as well as Audio Units (AU) on macOS.
The software helps a little by suggesting ‘essential’ and ‘full’ downloads – you can always revisit this page later, and a full basic sound set will use around 40GB on your hard drive. One nice touch is that when you load a project that requires a specific sound set you haven’t yet downloaded, the software can do this invisibly in the background and populate the project rather than requiring lots of extra steps.
There are also helpful project templates – quite a few in fact – that will get you up and running. These range from simple things like audio tracking and playing live loops to more complex surround productions and mastering a collection of tracks into an album. On this latter point, Studio One also contains integrated tools for uploading your music directly to TuneCore and SoundCloud, again removing tedious steps from this production phase.
The main interface is visually crowded, which is inevitable when apps become this multi-functional, but it can be customised. There are window layouts, showing and hiding of various sections, but you can also tweak colours and shades to your liking. Section borders can, for the most part, be freely dragged to create custom views, and by and large, it’s a fairly conventional experience with tracks, mixer channels, browsers and MIDI and audio editors all occupying similar locations as we are used to.
A newcomer to the DAW world will probably find it takes some time to work out where everything is, a byproduct of the sheer range of tools on offer. Anyone crossing over from a Cubase or a Logic will grasp the concepts more quickly, but others may have to do a little digging. PreSonus actually includes a selection of helpful tutorials in the app, and of course, there is content online to guide you too.
In terms of workflow, there’s extensive use of drag and drop, which works brilliantly, especially with the multi-tabbed Browser that can access not only all the local content on your machine quickly but also online sources like the PreSonus shop and the Splice sample and loop browser.
You get a free selection from Splice, but it does require an additional subscription for the full library since it’s a separate service. Another bonus is that Studio One comes with a specially integrated version of Melodyne Essential that can be called up to easily edit the pitch of any audio part without needing to load a separate plugin. While it offers Melodyne’s main tools for working with pitch and timing, it lacks some of the more advanced features of Cubase’s VariAudio or Logic’s Flex Pitch, like formant and vibrato control. That said, it is part of your purchase, sufficient for many users’ needs, and you do get upgrade options should you want them.
Dragging and dropping any kind of content – MIDI loops, stretched audio files, sound sets, and more – into a project automatically creates the correct kind of track or instrument. This is helpful especially for users who aren’t experts on the minutiae of file formats. A live loop mode and new clip launcher are particularly fun, turning the DAW into a performance tool with drag and drop and auto-stretching of loops and passages onto pads, which you can link to a MIDI controller.
A new feature and something many DAWs now include is stem separation – AI-powered processing that can analyse a stereo track and separate out the vocals, drums, bass and ‘other’ (anything left over), to remix or extract sources from mixed tracks. Right-click and select Stems on any audio file to make it happen. It’s relatively quick even on our aging MacBook Pro, seemingly running twice as fast as real time. While swift, it doesn’t seem currently to be as effective as the separation in Logic Pro, FL Studio or something more specialised like RipX DAW. Results are best with electronic music with fewer frequency crossovers, but with dense productions like tracks from Coldplay’s newest album, vocal harmonies managed to confuse it, causing artifacts and phasing to be heard. It’s not awful but needs refining.
In addition to a full complement of audio and MIDI editing tools, automation, video support and impressive support for Dolby Atmos and spatial audio mixing, Studio One also offers an audio batch converter function, VCA-based mixer control and powerful stem export and mixdown options. For composers, Studio One offers notation and score editing and printing tools as well as interchange with the company’s Notion software (Notion is included with a Pro+ subscription). While they won’t cover everything a professional orchestrator needs to do, these tools are more than enough for the majority of people needing to generate and work with scores for collaborators or smaller groups.
PreSonus has taken a sort of half-in, half-out approach to subscription pricing, providing three main options which can be perplexing. The first is to buy a perpetual license for £169, which gives you the DAW and a bunch of content, including all virtual instruments and 45 effects plugins, 20GB of loops and samples and 2500 Splice sounds. As noted, this is currently the first and only DAW to feature Splice integration for browsing, drag and drop of samples and loops directly inside a project. You get any new features, plugins and instruments that are added within a year of your purchase. After a year has passed, you can decide if and when to purchase another year of feature and content updates at a reduced update price, or keep the version you currently have.
The second option is the Pro+ subscription which, for £160 a year, gives you the DAW in perpetuity plus the Pro+ extras including the full library of over 120,000 loops and samples, new content releases every month, the add-on notation software Notion, 100GB of dedicated cloud storage for collaboration and live mix critiques with professionals. You also unlock the full MixFX collection. Thirdly, you can essentially ‘rent’ everything – the DAW and all the Pro+ content – with a £17 per month subscription.
Different developers take various approaches to pricing, and the options here seem pretty well thought-out to cater to users’ needs. The full functionality of the app, together with a decent bundle of content,t is there in the one-off purchase option. And, seriously, £169 for a DAW this powerful is an appealing price. Adding the Pro+ plan yearly subscription would start to add up in the long run – £480 over three years, as an example, but it’ll give you rolling updates and new content for the whole period. £17 a month makes more sense if you are either trying it out (though there is a free trial) or know that you’re only going to need it for a limited time. For comparison, this works out to about £200 a year, while if you commit to a year upfront, you get it for £160.
Some users may bemoan paying another £169 to restart their year of new feature updates, though this still works out to be comparable to paying to upgrade many other DAWs, with a higher purchase price, every 1.5 – 2 years. On the other hand, although the £135 upgrade to Studio One Pro 7 from any previous version is a great deal for Studio One Artist users and the like, those who have previously invested in Pro versions may well feel hard done by.
While we’re on comparisons, Cubase 14 Pro, the version to which Studio One’s feature set is the closest, is £481, but it does include advanced score editing and is a one-off purchase. Logic Pro is £199 (subsidised by Apple to sell hardware) and is Mac-only. Neither company uses a subscription model on the desktop, and all point updates are free, while major new versions are paid upgrades.
Studio One doesn’t have the sheer variety and quality of instruments that some other DAWs – Logic, FL Studio, Reason, Live – arguably do. In most cases, however, the versions of those DAWs that have the biggest bundled content are generally pushing £500 to buy outright, which is significantly more than Studio One. There are some omissions like integrated score editing, and you could make the case that though efficient, it lacks the panache of some competitors with its workmanlike interface, but this isn’t a big issue for most people.
Move past those factors, though, and Studio One packs a tremendous amount of functionality into an affordable package. The core offering of tools and content is solid, and should you wish to expand the sound sets with the Pro+ subscription, you get access to a bunch more stuff – though you’ll be adding your own instruments separately. Interactive content like mix critiques might be of niche interest, but are still something that few others are offering.
One thing PreSonus has really focused on to great effect is providing an end-to-end system that lets you do everything from sketches through full productions and mastering and online distribution of your music. It may not quite have the flair of some other DAWs, but it’s a proper workhorse with a deep and powerful feature set that most users will find gives them almost everything they need. This is all without breaking the bank.
Key features
- DAW for macOS, Windows and Linux
- Unlimited tracks, effects channels and buses
- 45 native effects
- 8 instruments including the recent Cinematic Lights
- Splice integration
- Spatial audio monitoring and Dolby Atmos mixing
- Clip launcher performance mode
- Stem separation
- VCA-controllable mixer
- Video, automation and mastering support
- Project Page for mastering, CD burning, DDP and digital release
- Show Page for live performance
- TuneCore and SoundCloud upload built in
- Pro+ upgrade gives access to Notion scoring software, 120,000 loops and samples and 100GB cloud storage
