Everyone here, and in other forums is so focused on features and value, architecture and whatnot, that they lose sight of the most important contributing factor: workflow.

Workflow is as critical as performance when your livelihood depends on it. Workflow is presented mostly through GUI (or UI/UX if you prefer), and - now that most DAWs pretty much have equal or competing feature sets (if not price or value) - make all the difference between an in-demand engineer sticking with, or switching to one DAW other another.

• Pro Tools is the music industry standard, at least in the US and most of the commercial studio English speaking world, and is not going away anytime soon (not unless the company goes belly up).

• Logic and Cubase/Nuendo are extraordinarily mature DAWs with deep roots in the music making community, and will continue to thrive for decades.

• Live is a beautifully modern and innovative approach to music production, can't see it vanishing overnight, or over any night.

• Samplitude/Sequoia is an excellent (stellar, really) DAW, very much underrated, and undervalued by its own ownership.

• Reaper is a fantastic, flexible DAW with as much the bedroom rapper, folk singer and mastering engineer in mind - and a master of bespoke workflow customizations (as reflected by its popularity and loyalty with said mastering engineers).

• Digital Performer is still the platform of choice for many (Hollywood) film composers, as well as the favored DAW of major artists' touring rigs (backing tracks and the likes), in direct competition with Pro Tools.

• Luna is still growing, and limited in its adoption and radiation by the Apollo hardware requirement - but UAD is playing the long game, and as much as I'm married to another DAW, I can't wait to see it mature and shine bright.

• Pyramix, SAW, soundBlade, SoundForge, WaveLab, DSP-Quattro (and the aforementioned Sequoia and Reaper) are mastering engineers' favored DAWs - "qualified for or dedicated to mastering" as Bob Katz put it - which should tell you something about their feature sets, stability, reliability, and... projected longevity.

There are other DAWS: Reason, Cakewalk, Studio One, FL Studio, Bitwig, etc. Make of them what you will. I've no doubt anyone can produce music on either of them. I just can't vouch for either of them (hold the hate: I'm not saying they're bad; I just can't tell one way or another due to lack of professional exposure to them - i.e., I've never encountered them in a professional context).

A final word: other than StudioVision, which was lost early on in the DAW history, there is only one truly professional DAW that's ever been shuttered, and that's Soundscape. This was a sublime DAW, and rival platform to Pro Tools (zero bugs, and much better sounding), with their own DSP PCI based audio interfaces (Mixtreme) and iBox XLR-24 and iBox 8 (line) rack mount audio interfaces. Amazing platform - sublime sounding and as I mentioned, zero bugs. There's a detailed wikipedia page that explains what happened to the company. TL;DR: Mackie 'bought' them and fucked them over. Then they erased (formatted) all the Soundscape servers - with all the Keygens - instantly bricking all the audio cards with DSPs. Mackie nucked themselves in other words, and sold whatever was left of the company to SSL (some will remember the silver SSL iBox XLR-24 reface of the early 2000s).

In short - with 8+ billion people on the planet, there's plenty of amateur and bedroom musicians to never run out of. And then those people will have children, and so on. Assuming there are only 200+ million amateurs and musicians on the planet - that's a big pie of licenses to split between a dozen companies.

What will determine who's got the biggest pie is not what is the industry standard, or which DAW is used by composers, but which DAW has the biggest user base - and that's determined by ease of use, aka workflow.

 

Last edited: Jan 15, 2025

FL Studio's midi is an exaggerated claim. Maybe this was true in the past, but it is not true anymore. I mean that now most DAWs have included similar and maybe better features in their software.

 

Exaggerated hardly it’s the best piano roll on the market lifetime free updates makes it worth owning

 

wasnt there 1-2 midi vst which beat fl piano roll ?

 

I produced a whole album for an indie/electronica band on Soundscape around late '98. I didn't mix it but i was there the whole time, during rec and mix. My engineer loved it but it definitely wasn't bug free on the software side, and i consider your quote of "far better sounding" as kinda funny tbh. Perhaps you refer to its summing algorithm (?), not really sure, we only used 24 discrete outputs to a 32ch Neve console and if i recall correctly we had our own Apogee 16bit/48khz ADDA converters.
Also, if we 're talking major players why quote Soundscape and leave out RADAR first introduced in '93 (preceding Soundscape by 4 years) and was actually the first 24 track hard disk recorder ever. Barry Henderson creator of Radar was awarded in 2019's NAMM show the TEC Hall Of Fame for his innovation with RADAR I. And in contrast to the totally defunct Soundscape, Radar is still alive with RADAR Studio being the latest. Last but not least, you can use your favorite DAW with RADAR hardware too!
Here, knock yourselves out hehe:
PS: Oh and fuck Pro Tools man. These guys will pimp their mothers to make more money lol. They constantly devise more ways to enslave users and have 'em pay more and more rather than be a force in driving innovation and giving back to their loyal customers. And be sure 65mil years ago Dinosaurs roamed the earth and were untouchable. Where are they now hehe. Take this into a digital era's analogy and i can foretell PT's days are numbered as more and more people move away from it. Comps are so powerful now, there is no need for DSP or a clunky DAW that after all these years can't properly do MIDI or Notation because they'd rather sell Sibelius and not integrate it into PT. So yeah, screw AVID and their joke policy.

 

Last edited: Jan 15, 2025

faulty?... expand pls.

 

i kinda want to jump to reaper, but i feel like a fish out of water... coming from ableton. I cant even make sense of dragging stuff in timeline.. heck i cant do anything..

 

if u really big on freedom and like to taylor things to your liking then Reaper is what u most likely will start to use when u get past the first fear at first site syndrome

 

because Reaper isn't Ableton,
Reaper can snap to beats, show beats timecode, stretching and looping can be beat based, you can have audio and midi within same track etc..
my suggestion is - keep Ableton you're familiar with, and approach Reaper as secondary different DAW without trying to mimc Ableton workflows

 

i hope cubase and studio one. fl studio is amazing too.. but.. i dont use it i used it from the start

 

Doesn't require Apollo hardware. The dealbreaker however is it doesn't have proper I/O functionality with other outboard hardware.

 

StudioVision was my favorite, and main driver until Gibson f'd them over....

and they, for all intents and purposes of what considered a "daw", (lets say for sake of definition, a software product integrating MIDI sequencing and digital audio editing and recording on a personal computer for the most part) were the first.

(not meaning to leave aside things like the Synclavier, which are a bit of a different beast...)

It was my favorite, and used it forever until I could no longer. They still had things/functions/abilities that worked quickly and other daws either are just implementing now, or is more convoluted, or don't have....

Special place in my heart for Opcode and Studio Vision Pro.... obviously it required Digidesign hardware etc as a competent front end/out end, but toss in a SampleCell card,.... it was frigging great.

 

Very nice writeup, thank you for it.
I wonder where Ardour stands. Years ago I considered it, but the MIDI implementation was very basic. Apparently it has improved over the years, but still not quite there yet.

 

bold claim saying take over because every daw works for every style of workflow.

Adding this as a cool new daw to keep an eye out for. They have a bunch of the cool AI tools all baked into a daw. Stems, midi gen, (sun.. i mean soon Gen AI )

They also have a LLM baked in. Think about being able to prompt to have repetitive tasks done for you via LLM. "Add the waves on track one as quarter notes for 32 bars" or "low cut all my tracks labels vocals at 100hz" etc..

They are currently down to launch their new version v soon. But its a good daw to watch for what will be implemented into other daws in the future.

https://wavtool.com/

 

this vid explains a bit better. Yeah not all these tools are useful and not for everyone. Like any new tech cherry pick what might fit in your workflow and apply.

 

S1

 

There's a mysterious message at the site. "WavTool has gone offline"

Seems like they've been forced to cut off the GPT4 integration for some reason. No more details.

 

Nice! Ok, so let's cut directly to the million dollar question: CAN IT TWERK???

 

yeah from my post they are about to launch their new version. Stay tuned! big mergers in their space is all i can say

 

Classical Foster thread. He still wants that someone else should do the hard work for compositions, because he himself is too dumb to do it.
A few months ago a simililar thread from him was about music tutors and now it's about daw makers. Just shut the fuck up and produce some music.