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Studio One's look and feel are similar to its rivals.

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The recent arrival of Propellerhead's Record has shown that there's still room for new DAWs. However, Record neatly sidestepped a head-on collision with the big hitters by being slightly leftfield.

By contrast, PreSonus' first foray into music software, Studio One, squares up directly with the Logics and Cubases of this world. Is PreSonus mad? Let's find out.

Overview

Studio One is said to include all you need for music production, from multitrack recording to effects processing, sound generation, and, in the Pro version we're reviewing here, mastering.

The cheaper Artist version (also bundled with all PreSonus FireStudio interfaces) has a reduced feature set, with other differences being fewer plug-ins and no third-party plug-in support.

The main production hub is the Song, which features unlimited audio, MIDI and instrument tracks, buses and effects channels. There are also 26 PreSonus effects; four instruments; automation; latency compensation; 32-bit or 64-bit processing; real-time timestretching; and AU, VST and ReWire support.

Mastering is performed in Projects, and these serve as a place to sequence mixdowns, as well as produce Red Book CDs, MP3 CDs and disc images. Finished mixes can easily be shifted between Songs and Projects, too.

In detail

To get you up and running with a minimum of fuss, Studio One includes a start window, in which you choose and create projects and songs, select audio interfaces and access tutorials. Here, users of PreSonus' FireStudio range of audio interfaces can benefit from some interface-specific song templates, and there's also the Cue Mix system.

This makes it easy to set up monitor mixes for artists to hear while recording. You allocate the physical outputs you want to use in the audio I/O settings, then each console strip shows an additional send level and pan for the monitor mix.

Clicking the padlock icon transfers the current channel level and pan to the send controls - in fact, this is the default mode, so activating Cue Mix immediately gives you a monitor mix balance matching your output mix.

So far, so good. However, the real beneficiaries of this system are those using PreSonus FireStudio audio interfaces, as their Cue Mix fader will also include a zero-latency button. With this engaged, monitored inputs are routed directly to the respective Cue Mix output using the audio interface's integrated mixer – ie, they don't pass through the Studio One software. Thus you get an adjustable zero-latency input signal combined with your other cue signals.