[kim_otcj]

I do find that, aside from routing, Podium gives me a decent amount of control over VSTs.

Any parameter a VST makes visible can be assigned to an automation track and controlled with an automation curve. With some synths (the HG Fortune ones come immediately to mind), Podium will automatically create the automation lanes for some parameters.

If the VST assigns control change numbers to its parameters, then I can assign those to a knob on my controller and write the automation curve in real time. So I may be a “basic” user, but there is no shortage of sophisticated things I can do with Podium in my studio set-up.

Another example is Podium’s hierarchical routing — and that’s the thing that drew me to Podium in the first place. You can put tracks in groups, and nest groups within groups, and at every stage the direction of your signal flow remains visible and obvious right there in the track window.

Say I’ve got a guitar part that I’ve set up with an effects stack — an EQ curve, a compressor, a send to a reverb bus, and so on. But for the solo parts I want to add a univibe plugin, an extra distortion, and a second aux bus set up with a delay plugin. I don’t want that to be a separate effects stack, I want that stuff added on top of the first lot of effects. Well, in Podium I can convert the guitar track to a group and add a child track, on which I put that second set of effects. Then I’d just slice up the guitar soundclip and put the solo parts on the child track.

Easy! I’ve added effects to just the solos without having to set up multiple automation lanes. Now I’m sure you could do the same in Reaper — because Reaper has very flexible routing — but only Podium has the hierarchical nesting thing that lets you actually see how your signal is being routed through the project. I think this feature of Podium has a lot of possibilities, but because it’s not a feature that other DAWs have, it kind of gets overlooked.

Now imagine the possibilities when you combine those group tracks and hierarchies with Podium’s offline render bouncing. This is what makes me think Podium would be an excellent DAW for doing very large projects, with oodles of effects, VST instruments, and audio tracks. You could nest the whole lot in groups of tracks, and then groups of groups. You can then bounce groups to create sub-mixes, all the way up the hierarchy, so you need never run out of memory or processing power during the project. You could do projects with hundreds of tracks this way.

So, in short, I don’t feel like I’m the least bit limited by Podium. I don’t think I’ve even begun to exhaust its possibilities.