Mixcraft 8 Home Studio is a relatively affordable DAW for beginners and hobby musicians, offering a basic setup with virtual instruments and effects, allowing music production on up to 16 tracks. The interface is intuitive and resembles other well-known DAWs, which makes getting started easier. And that's basically it - well, not quite… Because while Mixcraft 8 is beginner-friendly and runs reasonably stable, but why paying for something you can get elsewhere for free, in equal or even better quality?

Someone without much experience, like one of my students, will very likely run into technical issues when trying to combine 32-bit and 64-bit plugins. And apparently plugins aren’t always recognized reliably and for beginners, it can be confusing to figure out how and where VST plugins are installed, or scanned and managed. Additionally the MIDI features are fairly basic.

And that one student in particular was really determined to start out with Mixcraft, maybe the trailer got to him, since he's also into rock and metal. But by now he’s admitted he should’ve tried the free Tracktion Waveform instead. These days, he’s using Bitwig Essentials and couldn’t be happier. Since there’s such a wide range of software out there, my advice is always to try out free options first. Some are more than enough for specific purposes (like Audacity or Reaper), others are simply fun to use (like MPC Beats), and some are perfect for figuring out some things (like Studio One Prime). Either way you’ve got to experiment a bit and dive into it and make comparisons.

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