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 at 8:20 AM

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