So, what DAW did it for you?

[Enkerli]

Still not there, yet. It’s a long process.

Used Performer back in 1989 (before it became “Digital”), but that wasn’t really a DAW (no audio processing). Used Deluxe Music Construction Set before that. Also dabbled in Csound, Turbosynth, Passport Alchemy, Music Mouse, IRCAM’s Max (before MSP)… then mostly missed the DAW era. Knew it was happening, tried GarageBand on occasion, did a couple of things in NanoStudio, checked out some other things. But they weren’t for me. Had a much better time plugging my Yamaha WX-11 wind controller into ThumbJam. Or MainStage.

A bit over a year ago, got into Korg Gadget on iOS. It did start to click, for me. There’s something there which works with the way my mind works. But never got that deeply into it.
Through Gadget, started using Ableton Live Lite, going through some Lynda.com training. Also clicked, to a certain extent, but not completely. It mostly got me to understand how other people do what they do, but it’s not my type of thing.

Was mostly musicking with non-DAW software like Pure data, SuperCollider, ChucK, Processing and, my favourite, Sonic Pi. Was having a blast and it was fairly equivalent to that Armiin moment described by the OP (though my references are different):

Did what?

So you used it and were able to like your music and you actually play these songs to everyone and feel like Armin van Buuren.

Had something like this with Sonic Pi. Partly because the onboarding experience encourages the type of learning which makes the most sense to me. Gave workshops about it and different people have different reactions. Among those who have no background in music, many get to it right away (and learn some coding skills in the process). People who have a solid background in music also take to it quickly. Those who are most reticent to Sonic Pi tend to be people who have an idea of how music “should” be.

But, back to DAWs.

Tried Tracktion T5 after hearing that they’d come out with a Raspberry Pi version. Got really confused. Really interesting to me that several people here mentioned Tracktion DAWs as the one which clicked. It didn’t do this for me at all.

Eventually bought a Lightpad Block, to try it (the Apple Store return policy is pretty decent). Never returned it. They ended up adding a full license to Tracktion Waveform. Spent more time trying to learn it. Not finding very useful documentation for it, including the permanent-beta one by Bill Edstrom. Didn’t find examples particularly inspiring. Collective doesn’t do it for me as a softsynth (and it doesn’t support MPE!) Had enough crashes that opening it feels like trying my luck. Still using it as my main “AU/VST host with MPE-recording capability”, but it doesn’t really “do it” for me.

The one which probably would do it for me is Bitwig. Eventually got a license to 8-Track and went through tutorials about it. Can really perceive where this is going. The problem with 8-Track isn’t so much the limitations but the fact that it’s mostly based on the BWS 1.6 codebase. Part of the headaches come from my attempts to use controllers which aren’t supported directly, like the Eigenharp Pico. Would probably be better with BWS 2.3. Still didn’t buy it while it was on sale in part because the sale price wasn’t that compelling. Still not deriving so much value from the DAW lifestyle as to invest that much money into it.

Will probably buy Apple’s pro app bundle for education, once Logic is updated (which might happen soon). Now, that’s a compelling price!
Not a fan of the Logic interface or workflow, but it has several compelling features including the same virtual instruments as MainStage. Having played with Melodyne Essential (bundled with Waveform) and Waves Tune, can really hear the power of exporting audio tracks to MIDI. Tried Flex Pitch in an Apple Store and it sounds like it could do the job. Plus, MPE support is a major factor for me. Logic probably won’t be the DAW which really clicks, for me. But it’ll probably deepen my exploration of the DAW world. Getting to experience “how the other half lives”.

[antic604]

Amen to that - the flat look (started with Windows 8 ) is trend-based garbage UI design that has an overwhelmingly negative effect on computing.

How so? If anything, it's less computing-intensive than drawing all those fake 3D borders, fake rotating knobs and moving sliders, fake shadows and textured surfaces... It's also easier to read and scales better, which is important considering multitude of available form factors and screen sizes / densities.

[Bombadil]

Oh...And this

For me, it would be this. Logic is an amazing program, I don't know if everything it can do has been sussed out.

Logic is also the only DAW I am familiar with. My recording M.O. went from:

Ping-ponging 2 cassette decks, first Dolby B, to DBX.
Tascam 4 tr. Portastudios, usually two at a time;
Roland 880EX/VS-2000CD;
Logic.

There's something to be said for the Roland, but it is quite clunky and slow in comparison to modern DAWs. When they came out 20+ years ago, they were cutting edge. BUT: if you were going to do keyboard parts, you couldn't just enter the notes into a MIDI grid. You had to be able to PLAY. And SING.

I love Logic. I never thought, short of the *RockStar' fantasy, that I'd have such a tool at my disposal. However, I am increasingly disenchanted with Apple's business model, so I may go to the Dark Side and get Samplitude. I've tried Reaper, didn't like it. My view is, go with what I know, and I know Logic sufficiently well to get done what I need/want done, with few hassles.

[dupont]

Oh...And this

For me, it would be this. Logic is an amazing program, I don't know if everything it can do has been sussed out.

Logic automation is really too basic and really sucks compared with Reaper automation items or Studio one automation tools.
This is perhaps not important for some users but if you do heavy automation editing (EDM for example) it is a pain.
Even drawing a simple square shaped automation in the midi editor is a pitta in Logic.
Some plugins has not been updated since 1980.
And the main Logic drawbacks : you must have a overrated, overpriced, outrageously expensive, underspecs (2500 $ imac still have a 4200 rpm DD ! ). And Apple is not a fair company, planned obsolescence, tax optimization...

My favorite DAW : Reaper, I like the phylosophy of Cockos team.
You can try the soft as long as you want before you buy, is highly customisable, has a great user forum, CPU efficient, starts fast, regulary updated (not once every 6 months for a minor update), powerfull, I can draw complex automation waveforms that you won't even dream to do in Logic.

Everything I can do in Logic, I can in Reaper but everything I can do in Reaper, I can't in Logic.

[Bombadil]

Fortunately, I know how to record and mix, and have had no issues with Logic automation.

[do_androids_dream]

Again, really? I got an early version with a Mackie I/O device but I could never work it out. Then recently I got a free full license of the latest version of Traktion through Roli and it stayed on my PC for exactly one night. It's UI and workflow was utterly impenetrable to my tired brain.

Kind of the same experience here at first with Tracktion. But, I would give it more than one night It's actually very elegant in a way - I do like the left to right paradigm. But.. my main reason for not using it much in the end is because it has some pretty major bugs (poof to desktop situations that are hard to pin down) in my experience and has problems with some plugins and sidechaining ie. the sidechain circuit of a plugin may or may not show up in Tracktion.

[dupont]

Again, really? I got an early version with a Mackie I/O device but I could never work it out. Then recently I got a free full license of the latest version of Traktion through Roli and it stayed on my PC for exactly one night. It's UI and workflow was utterly impenetrable to my tired brain.

Kind of the same experience here at first with Tracktion. But, I would give it more than one night It's actually very elegant in a way - I do like the left to right paradigm. But.. my main reason for not using it much in the end is because it has some pretty major bugs (poof to desktop situations that are hard to pin down) in my experience and has problems with some plugins and sidechaining ie. the sidechain circuit of a plugin may or may not show up in Tracktion.

I was a Tracktion user from T1 to T7 but decided not to purchase a licence for waveform 8, lot of bugs still not solved from the preview versions, unusable.
After several mails send to the support team, no solutions have been found, so I was fed up.

[jancivil]

first thing I acquired was Reason. Reason 2, soon to be 2.5. While I liked Mälstrom, hours of fun, the layout of the thing was just not conducive to anything. I didn't have preconceptions, I didn't know what I was doing really, just didn't click at all. I was sold it by a guy in Guitar Center.

Later I was in there trying to find shit out, the one thing I knew about was ProTools but another customer told me, you don't want that, you have to have all this gear to really run it, you want Cubase. And I got Cubase SX1. I stared idiotically at it for a while, a good while before doing anything. Finally I just got in there and started recording into the piano roll. I realized I didn't have to record a whole track in one go, live, I could bloody edit, and radically. It was all so straightforward and I didn't get there by reading the manual, actually I didn't need it hardly at all. I was so comfortable in it I was just not OtherDAW-curious. Eventually I wanted better latency, it was slow on Mac for a long time, so I bought Logic and Digital Performer. Around that time VE Pro was released, obviating the problem of loading all this stuff in Cubase and as it turns out VE Pro is Cubase-friendly and connecting both Logic and DP was complicated. Cubase is less hassle than either for me, by far.

I'm a linear, through-compose composer most of the time. If I write a song type of form with repeats, I don't mind doing it by hand basically. What I always wanted was something you just turn on and start working, like a Synclavier. There never was a dedicated [to vsti] computer worth a shit so you adapt to what there is. But I want it simple; and what I do not do is wonder what's missing. A need may arise organically, you know but this whole thing of speculating about tools seems like a waste of time one can be using what one has.

[Zexila]

Logic automation is really too basic and really sucks compared with Reaper automation items or Studio one automation tools.
This is perhaps not important for some users but if you do heavy automation editing (EDM for example) it is a pain.
Even drawing a simple square shaped automation in the midi editor is a pitta in Logic.

Yeah, Logic automation sucks, period.

Some plugins has not been updated since 1980.

Yeah, they are that awesome all this time.

And the main Logic drawbacks : you must have a overrated, overpriced, outrageously expensive, underspecs (2500 $ imac still have a 4200 rpm DD ! ). And Apple is not a fair company, planned obsolescence, tax optimization...

You are exaggerating, you don't need 2.5k mac to make music, sorry if you do.

My favorite DAW : Reaper, I like the phylosophy of Cockos team.
You can try the soft as long as you want before you buy, is highly customisable, has a great user forum, CPU efficient, starts fast, regulary updated (not once every 6 months for a minor update), powerfull, I can draw complex automation waveforms that you won't even dream to do in Logic.

Everything I can do in Logic, I can in Reaper but everything I can do in Reaper, I can't in Logic.

Guess you found your DAW.

[Jace-BeOS]

Amen to that - the flat look (started with Windows 8 ) is trend-based garbage UI design that has an overwhelmingly negative effect on computing.

How so? If anything, it's less computing-intensive than drawing all those fake 3D borders, fake rotating knobs and moving sliders, fake shadows and textured surfaces... It's also easier to read and scales better, which is important considering multitude of available form factors and screen sizes / densities.

Show me some stats on the technical benefits. i think you're just repeating an inaccurate tech meme used to justify flat graphics. Aside from the notion of providing free scaling (which requires vector graphics computation, and more CPU/GPU), there was no problem with existing bitmap designs. Scaling them up in size was easy, if you created the original artwork at a large enough size (and seeing how long it's taking developers to support high-PPI displays, clearly few developers created large source artwork to accommodate future display improvements).

In fact, it turned out that the experiments in scalable vector graphics for freely scaled GUI designs failed to accomplish what simply using larger bitmaps and fixed sizes solved as display pixel density increased. Apple, when they were still actually the UI design kings, attempted a vector GUI at one point with OS X and found there were just too many variables to track to make free scaling work with as much consistency and elegance as pre-defined sizes of larger bitmaps. Open a Mac OS app package or a Windows binary/DLL in a resource editor and see all the bitmaps still providing the GUI elements. The moving around of even large bitmaps takes less CPU/GPU than the rendering of complex interacting vector graphics.

Even where software IS using vector interfaces, their lack of skill drawing vector artwork, and the required CPU/GPU to draw complex vector graphics, results in ugly, generic, and hard-to-intuit designs (or wasted CPU/GPU, when CPU especially should be left to other things, like audio processing). There are so many hard-to-look-at apps now, where knobs are thin lined circles with a misplaced straight line as an indicator of its position. No shading. No depth. No delineation between objects. Ugly. And that leads me to the more important factor:

The losses to human usability with these flat designs are far worse than any specious gains in the technical area. In fact, using iOS as an example, iOS 7, which introduced their new flat garbage design, ran like SHIT. iOS has been on a downward plunge ever since in performance AND usability. They didn't even change the underlying design tech, just the skin on top of it. All the same controls are there, but with almost all visual cues removed (the details that humans use intuit WTF is a control and what is decoration, plain text, or a non-functional object).

This flat design trend is just a trend. It is not a technological move forward. It is the opposite of human-computer interface expertise and the opposite of progress. It is a regression. An ironic one, seeing as we now have these displays capable of almost print-resolution pixel density, which is being squandered on flat, simplistic, confusing garbage bitmap graphics.

[metamorphosis]

I was a Tracktion user from T1 to T7 but decided not to purchase a licence for waveform 8, lot of bugs still not solved from the preview versions, unusable.
After several mails send to the support team, no solutions have been found, so I was fed up.

Yeah, for some reason the T team are big on reporting new features, not so much on stabilizing what they have. Beta-testing doesn't appear to be something they do. Undo is broken in 6, for example. I wish they didn't follow the Windows/Mac example of making the public beta testers - it's not effective.

This flat design trend is just a trend. It is not a technological move forward. It is the opposite of human-computer interface expertise and the opposite of progress. It is a regression. An ironic one, seeing as we now have these displays capable of almost print-resolution pixel density, which is being squandered on flat, simplistic, confusing garbage bitmap graphics.

With (in the case of windows) awful font aliasing

[Jace-BeOS]

With (in the case of windows) awful font aliasing

That stinks. i've not yet seen Windows 8/10 running on high-PPI displays. My PCs are old and their displays pathetic. i remember when the Windows 95 Plus Pack came out, with text anti-aliasing and full window dragging (things Win95 should've had without an add-on). It was such an improvement to the ugly aliased text at the time, but, over the years, it never seemed to progress further. It took so long to get to high-PPI displays.

i'm definitely accustomed to crisp text on the "retina" displays of my iPhone 4, 6, and iPad Pro, though, so using my MacBook Pro 5,5 and iMac 12,2 for a lot of text is somewhat annoying to me. i wear glasses, so antialiased text looks like blurring to me and i unconsciously lean in and/or squint when i don't need to. Without antialiasing, though, text on low-PPI displays is just super ugly.

[Scrubbing Monkeys]

In 1984 I was trying to record some guitar ideas with a boom box, a radio shack mic. Iused my only adapter to connect the mic to the boom box...a Y jack. When I played it back it only came out of one speaker. It must be the Y jack, I thought......Hey, I wonder if i switch sides of they Y jack if i could record to the other side....HOLY $#@&! I can jam with my self. This really souldnt have worked but it did. The erase head should have wiped out the previousbrecording but didnt. I wore the damn thing out in about a year. Then, I saw a Fostex F 160 in a music store. I then learned you could do this 4 times. HOLY $#@&! Game on. I wore it out in about 2 years.

Then onto,

Tascam 38 _8 track
The tascam 38 combinrd wth Vestax 8trk hard disk.
Three Tascam Da 88s synced together.
Fostex 24 trk hard disk.

Finally Reaper on a laptop........thats the daw that did it for me. Basically continuing the tape idea.

[Lotuzia]

No poll ? No fish ?

Actually, Cubase did it for me. Because I does all I need it to do, more/less effortless

[BONES]

My favorite DAW : Reaper, I like the phylosophy of Cockos team.
You can try the soft as long as you want before you buy, is highly customisable, has a great user forum, CPU efficient, starts fast, regulary updated (not once every 6 months for a minor update...

I actually see that as a disadvantage. I have much better things to be doing than constantly updating software, especially something that's been around as long as Reaper has. One update a year is more than enough, any more and I start to get annoyed.

Everything I can do in Logic, I can in Reaper but everything I can do in Reaper, I can't in Logic.

I'd suggest that simply means you don't know how to use Logic as well as you know how to use Reaper.