OK, so let's talk about DAWs...

[Nitrateaudio]

I started on Logic a long time ago before it got bought by Apple. I switched to Cubase and was on that for about 10 years up until 10.5. Then I switched to FL Studio and have been on it ever since. FL Studio took some getting used to , but now I think I mastered most of it and am used to it. Its sort of a beat makers / EDM guys DAW but I use it for the type of music i do, which is roots, indie, rock, folk. It handles long recordings fine and all VIs and VSTs pretty much work fine on it. Not sure I would recommend it to orchestral guys, but anything is possible, as long as you have an open mind about it. It sort of forces you to use a different workflow and its very open ended, meaning there are more than a few ways to go about achieving the same thing -- you just got to pick the one you like best and use that way of doing things. Upgrades and updates are free so that has been great. Any they always seems to throw in a new plugin with each update. I think if I ever were to consider switching to a different DAW, it might be back to Cubase or DP. I hear lots of musicians whos music I really like use DP still.

 

[HCMarkus]

I love DP.

That said, the best overall DAW advice I can offer is: Love the one you're with.

 

[CookieJarvis]

As a traditional musician Nuendo hits all the right spots for me...I just wish the GUI was more like Luna or MixBus

 

[proggermusic]

I gotta say, the Reason-love I've been seeing recently (reasontly) has made me really curious about it. Not sure if I'm curious enough to buy a license... particularly since I'm comparably curious about Cubase... but it seems that people really enjoy the experience of using it, which sounds lovely. But, to be honest, that's exactly what lured me to Logic many years ago.

A couple decades ago I was finishing school, just starting to tour, writing as much music as I could (with a keyboard, staff paper, and Finale), and was only starting to get curious about how I might produce actually-somewhat-decent music digitally on a computer. I had no interest in Pro Tools since I didn't want to be mainly a studio recording/mixing/mastering engineer, I wanted to play with sounds and remain a musician/composer first and foremost. So the three terms I heard thrown around were "Logic," "Reason," and "Cubase."

The reason Logic lured me in is simply that I played around with my friend's copy on a tour bus for a while and got hooked. Within a year I bought a Macbook just so I could buy Logic for it (I had been on a Windows XP tower before) and here we are eighteen years later. Haven't ever even installed another DAW on any of my computers since then, except, ironically, for Pro Tools for some editing and comping work.

At any rate, I'm glad we have all these options, and at this point I'm so familiar with Logic that it's effortless to get up and running and I feel like all the limitations are within myself, not the program. But I so very much enjoy playing around with new toys and learning new things, I almost bought Cubase on the most recent sale and now Reason has me curious all over again.

 

[CrimsonWarlock]

I gotta say, the Reason-love I've been seeing recently (reasontly) has made me really curious about it. Not sure if I'm curious enough to buy a license... particularly since I'm comparably curious about Cubase...

If you are thinking about Reason, then just a few things you should know (mostly tmo of course): They (LandR) rolled out Reason 14 way to early. I was on the beta team and there were quite a few outstanding issues when they decided to release it. The consensus in the community seems to be that they wanted (or needed) to recoup part of their new investment in buying Reason Studios fast so decided to release it prematurely. V14 is still pretty buggy. The second issue, specifically for me, is that it seems to me they are trying to dumb it down, by basically hiding the one thing that makes Reason special: the rack. This is why I'm not upgrading to 14, and moved to Cubase (and pretty happy about that so far).

The positive thing is that LandR, right after to take-over, decided to make the Rack Plugin available as a separate purchase/license. Before, you could only get the Rack Plugin by buying the full Reason DAW. The Rack Plugin, of course, let you use the rack with Rack Extensions in any other DAW that is VST3 compatible. So, I'm happily using all my Rack Extensions (500+ of them) in Cubase. This doesn't give the full rack experience like in Reason DAW, but for me that gets compensated well enough with the things Cubase brings to the table.

While I was using Reason exclusively over the last six years, I decided to work only with Rack Extensions and stay away from VST-plugins. You can use VST2/3 plugins in Reason, but they don't integrate into the rack like Rack Extensions do. Now that I'm moving to Cubase, the Rack Plugin is basically another VST3 plugin, so recently I've been on a buying spree to get several additional VST plugins for things I didn't really have a Rack Extension equivalent for.

 

[proggermusic]

That's right, I remember reading that Landr had bought Reason... that's reason enough for me to pass. Propellorhead seemed like a cool company, healthy competitor to Steinberg. Yamaha seems like an excellent parent company for Steinberg and I have nothing against that partnership, it seems to be an great situation. It's more likely I'd wind up with Cubase as my alternative to Logic, should I ever need one.