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Good alternative to GarageBand ( windows 10 PC)

stuntbass77

stuntbass77

Nov 6, 2007
1,806
1,208
#1
This is my first time over here in the recording section in years. I am a long time Mac user going back almost 20 years. Well now I am on a very fixed income and I save my dough from B-days and Christmas to buy things. Now, to the point I was gifted a PC ( intel i3-6100 dual processor with 8GB ram, which I will be adding to ) running windows 10 home. I am looking for a GarageBand alternative, I do mostly recording live instruments and vocals. I do want some loops but easy of use is important. Why, I have a family and I don’t have a ton of time anymore to mess around for hours with a new leaning curve. I am happy with GargeBand but my Mac mini is starting to go. I want something that is at least as good at what GarageBand is able to do. GarageBand is simple but still renders for me good recordings ( hey, I’m not a pro ). Will be running a focusrite 2i2 , which does the job ( not as well as my old firepod but that broke and don’t have that kind of money right now ). Any help in this area would be much appreciated!!!
 
#3
okcrum said:
On a severe budget, the top two choices on PC are Audacity and Ardour. Both have more bells and whistles than Garage Band, so they have a bit of learning curve. Audacity is more an audio toolkit you can record and mix with. Ardour is a fully-featured DAW.
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I do have about $80-100 dollars do play with but don’t want to go up from there. Thanks for the input. If there is one that has more bells and whistles that’s ok I just don’t need say a full version of pro tools. I’m asking everyone here because the reviews are all over the place so it’s hard to decide. At one point I was thinking Reaper but the reviews are subjective and mixed and not sure if these people are getting any kick backs for their reviews. Again, thanks !
 
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#4
I need something that has good plugging for guitar modeling ( I play acoustic only ) as well as bass. I have a djembe drum and a ukulele I pull out once in a while. I write songs and sing them terribly but I enjoy the process and seeing it come together. I generally only record one track at a time but would like the ability to do more if possible in the future. I have an old version of GarageBand and paid to have all the extra loops and effects which is nice, so I do like having those kind of tools to help improve sound. Sound modeling is what I am real interested in and getting a good recording.
 
#6
estimated_eyes said:
I've been playing around with Reaper recently (coming from Audacity). Really liking it so far. Looks like the functionality with IR's is easy. It's free to use for 60? days, would suggest playing around with the program :thumbsup:
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i just may do that, thanks ! How are the plug-ins ( effects like chorus, reverb, echo, compression ). I like being able to have access to some decent guitar shaping for my acoustic, bass is much easier for me to dial in and get the right tone without much change. How about vocals, have you recoded any ? Thanks again !
 
#7
stuntbass77 said:
i just may do that, thanks ! How are the plug-ins ( effects like chorus, reverb, echo, compression ). I like being able to have access to some decent guitar shaping for my acoustic, bass is much easier for me to dial in and get the right tone without much change. How about vocals, have you recoded any ? Thanks again !
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The default VSTs for Reaper are pretty good, and there's a bunch of them. Obviously there are better ones that you'd have to pay for from 3rd party. Reaper is a 60 day "trial" that will still let you use it past 60 without paying though.
 
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#9
stuntbass77 said:
i just may do that, thanks ! How are the plug-ins ( effects like chorus, reverb, echo, compression ). I like being able to have access to some decent guitar shaping for my acoustic, bass is much easier for me to dial in and get the right tone without much change. How about vocals, have you recoded any ? Thanks again !
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I honestly just started playing with the program so I am pretty new in regard to experience with all you mentioned.

Right when I began my transition from Audacity my neighbor expressed discontent with my guitar levels coming from my apartment :banghead:. This has halted my progress while I wait for a Suhr Reactive Load to arrive.

Again, the program has a 60 day trial period and is not taxing on a computer so I would suggest having some fun playing around with it and seeing what you think.
 
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#11
I have been using Reaper for the last 5 years. 60 bucks for the license that that has never run out. Plenty of support on the Cukos Reaper forum. No problem recording 16 tracks at a time or just individually. I treat it like an old style 2 inch tape system except I have never run out of tracks.
I run mine on a laptop. 16 Ram, i7, 2.2gH
Check It out. Also, it has a great downloadable manual.

Thanks
 
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#12
I was in your exact shoes a few years ago. I'm a mac guy who found himself without a mac but had a windows laptop. In the end I went back to mac as soon as I could. I tried audacity and reaper and a few other things and none of them is as intuitive to me as garageband. It also complicated things in terms of the interface. I also use a focusrite scarlett and it became a headache in terms of needing to install new drivers and all kinds of BS. It's a long way of saying I have no advice for you other than you may be able to sell your current mac for something and buy a used one that you can use for garageband only.
 
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#14
Reaper is the defacto standard in free (ish) cross platform pro level daws.

Nowadays though, there is cakewalk sonar which is now a FREE app, and was my daw of choice for many years before they disappeared.

Now it's called "Cakewalk by Bandcamp". Cakewalk - The World's Best Software For Recording And Making Music On PC And Mac

to me, cakewalk is closer to garage band than, say, Reaper, but I use reaper for pro work all the time, and used to use cakewalk for pro work, and likely will again now that it even has a free android app and shared repo to work on your projects at home, on the go, etc.
 
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#20
sotua said:
Reaper is around $60, and you can evaluate freely without restrictions to see if you like it.

However, I want to say that an i3 will probably be underpowered for any kind of processing/FX you want to run on your tracks. Also I would check if you have a SSD in there - back when I recorded with HDDs, I had lots of latency issues.
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This is very true. If you are able to add memory, that will help, but by the time you do that and add an ssd, you'll still have a very minimal DAW machine. Not unusable by any means, but as soyua said, limited as to the number of tracks, VSTs and effects you can use, and possibly having uncomfortably high latency when using VST synths and guitar sims. Mechanical disk drives can slow down loading, especially if you have large sample libraries.
 
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