Software I Like To Use
Scrivener
By Literature and Latte
Of all the writing tools I have encountered in my travels, this one is the best. Period. Ever. Scrivener makes ordinary word processors like Microsoft Word look like primitive toys by comparison. Basically, what it does, is it breaks your long project (say, a thesis, or a novel) into many smaller projects, the size of which is up to you, and then lets you organize them however you want — into folders, document groups, selection sets, etc.; and it goes even further, representing each piece of your writing puzzle as an actual index card on a corkboard, to which you can also attach images, text, links, bookmarks, what have you. And it can organize those, too. It can do tables of contents; it can keep all your research together; it’s compatible with citation software; and, it’s only $49. Oh, and did I mention — you can import and export Word Documents, and PDFs? You can. And you can view your notecards on a sort of “role-based” timeline. And you can stitch your smaller documents together into larger ones in any order and in any way you want. Scrivener also separates the “writing” process from the “formatting” process; so you don’t have to worry about how something is going to look on the page until you’ve finished with the most important part — the writing itself. For $49 on the Mac App Store (the Windows version, as of this writing, is still one version behind the Mac version, but I understand that’s changing very soon), this is one hell of a deal. I’ve written four novels in Scrivener, and now only use Word to “touch up” my finished Scrivener output. It’s been a godsend for me, it really has . . . Maybe it can be one for you too.
Logic Pro X
Somewhere in the history of electronic music production, sequencers (programs that record and play back MIDI data; i.e., computer-controlled and/or generated musical note data) and digital audio software (programs that record, produce, and output actual audio, like a vocal or drum machine performance), came together and had beautiful children (well, I guess that depends on how you define “beautiful”). And the most beautiful of them all is Logic Pro X. These programs are called DAWS — “Digital Audio Workstations.” There’s a lot of them out there — from Ableton Live, to Cubase Pro, to Cakewalk, to Pro Tools . . . The list goes on, and so does the competition between companies to create the best DAW . But like the McCloud said: “There can be only one.” And that “one” is Logic Pro X, made and sold by Apple, and which, unfortunately for all you Windows users out there, only runs on Macs. It’s got every feature you can possibly think of, and more. Its virtual instrument and “plugins” technology is what I used to produce the music you can listen to elsewhere on this site! It can handle an unlimited number of tracks, up to a thousand audio tracks at once; up to a thousand virtual instruments at once; 1024 auxiliary mixing channels; it has cool icons to stand for your different parts; it comes with a bundle of really kick-ass plugins — including a basic sampler and a pretty decent guitar amp — and did I mention it’s easy to use? Because it is. Very. You get used to the “Logic Paradigm” fairly quickly, and once you do, all other sequencers will look like children’s toys by comparison.