I’m looking for a good, straightforward and easy to use studio software to record guitar and vocals for my Renoise tracks. I’ve been using a free software called Quartz Studio Free which is pretty limiting with 4 + 2 tracks and no vst. Anyone got suggestions?
I’d rather go for easy to use and to learn than a lot of fancy stuff I’d never touch. Tried Cubase a while back, but I didn’t like the first impression…
Don`t know if this would fit your needs but there is another freebie audacity:
http://audacity.sourceforge.net/about/features
It does have VST support with an enabler but do not know how effective it is.
There is also Kristal audio Engine (also free):
http://www.kreatives.org/kristal/index.php…hp?section=news
basic but with VST support and up to 16 tracks.
Thanks! 
They both seem like they would do the trick… I think I’ll check out Kristal first, it looks the most how I would expect a program like this to look like 
why do you need vst support?
…well if there are enough good native effects I won’t. I need reverbs, compressors… some exciter perhaps… mastering stuff.
Yeah I’ve been looking for something to replace Soundforge with since I have been trying to break away from using software which I know I will never be able to afford…
Had Audacity on my list, may be worth checking out Kristal for the more basic stuff as well?
You could try Acoustica, very affordable, they promised VST support for the upcoming V4. Currently only DirectX plugins are supported.
I use Audition 1.5 at work all the time which in all regards except vst it is exceptional in it’s functionality. It’s vst support is fairly clunky, so I’d recommend Wavelab in that regard. Both you have to buy.
If those wonderful people made The Gimp to provide a free open source alternative to Photoshop, then surely there must be a growing movement and need for an open source free alternative to Audition. That would simply be amazing. Adobe’s software is way overpriced.
If money doesn`t count samplitude pro V8.2
If it does count try checking
magix music studio 11
or
http://www.frieve.com/english/musicstd/download.html
or www.mackie.com tracktion
or http://fasoft.com/ ntrack
I just discovered REAPER. It’s a free app (until version 1), best suited for mixing and recording audio.
It has some nice effects already and it supports DX and VST as well. It also has PDC, send effects, automation…
It’s very easy to use, very intuitive. Nice interface with skins support…
Check it out, you won’t regret it!
Then there’s another nice freeware (maybe forever?, now it’s still alpha, tho): Wavosaur. It’s an audio editor, like Wavelab, Soundforge…
It’s still in the making, but looks very promising!
If Kristal would do the trick and you can somehow get hands on an issue of the most recent german “Keys” magazine, go get it.
On their cover cd they’re including a full copy of Samplitude SE for free.
Here is what you get:
http://www.philatio.de/docs/samplitude.pdf (german)
If you speak german you might want to try samplitude V8 SE which came shipped with this months keys music mag.
I’m really impressed by the feature set and ease of use of this one. I know that it’s not the final release, but it didn’t crash to me yet.
It has some routing options that are already better than some Cubase has. Like, for send FXs: you can select the channels to be sent to the send track right there on the send track itself (by clicking I/O). Waaay quicker than in Cubase.
I wouldn’t mind at all if this way of routing was adopted in the Renoise mixer! 
And it has reordering of inserts. (another one that’s missing in Cubase-but that’s more like a weakness of the latter than anything.)
It has some good timestretching, too. Here’s how you do it (quoted from the thread at KVR):
“Hang your cursor over the right edge of an item, and press alt+drag. Bingo. You can stretch it quite a way before it sounds bad. To pitch shift, hilight an item an hit shift+7 to pitch down 1 cent, shift+8 to go up a cent, shift+9 to go down a semitone, shift+0 to pitch up a semitone. Works like a champ.
Note that You must use the number keys above the qwerty keys, and NOT the keypad. Those are resverved for other functions.”
I can’t wait for Renoise to get the accurate/compatible tempo-timing so I could use Reaper’s timestretching very quickly in combination with Renoise. (until the latter gets one, of course 
)
REAPER looks very interesting… gonna have to check it out.
Kristal works ok, better than the old program I had. Still, it’s a bit limited, and got some UI annoyances.
Just letting you know that Reaper now has ReaRoute, it’s something similar to ReWire.
First, select the ReaRoute soundcard in Renoise then select the ReaRoute outputs for the channels in Renoise and then select those channels as inputs on the tracks of Reaper. You can then record those channels in Reaper.
(Let me know if you need more info about this, or better yet (for you 
): refer to the Reaper manual/guides/forum.)
It’s in its early stage, so I don’t know how useful can it be for you. I haven’t even checked it thoroughly yet. Probably you can record something (from the soundcard) along the output from Renoise.
energyXT is also nice, and besides standalone version it even comes as an VST(i), so you can use it as an audio track player inside Renoise. Or as an piano roll. Or modular VST(i) host. Or…
Check it out: www.xt-hq.com