very funny Reaper response, illustrating perhaps the userbaseTrensharo wrote: Thu Dec 03, 2020 2:57 pmLiteral wall of text. Do you actually expect people to read that?Rockatansky wrote: Mon Nov 30, 2020 5:38 pm For me, it's the other way round. I have both Cubase and Studio One, legit licenses, and I never use them, only for compatibility testing or to check on 'how to' something. They're both heavyweight, slow and cludgy to me. Constant worries about track types and routing, constant worries about selected mouse tools and 'does my version support this feature'. Reaper on the other hand opens up in a fragment of the time, doesn't require you to create named projects in folders before it allows you to do anything, and everything is just where I expect it to be. It has all the basic tools you need in sufficient quality, and it just makes sense. People who can't make sense of Reaper are usually (!) either resistant to learning its workflow because they already spent half their productive lives using another DAW, and they just don't feel like putting in the time required to learn the intricacies of a new tool, or they went into the experience expecting something negative and disappointing to start with, and thereby turned it into a self-fulfilling prophecy. The myth of the 'steep learning curve' and 'bad MIDI editing' comes from about a decade ago, when people who had been using other software checked it out and couldn't figure it out. Reaper is used to produce award-winning music, it's used to create sounds and soundtracks for current video games, it will happily let you create anything from voice-overs to hybrid software/real-world instrument projects and even full-blown orchestra recordings with weird microphone constellations and channel counts in the hundreds (if you have the interface for it). Which is not something the affordable versions of Cubase or Studio One let you do. Since MIDI is so often mentioned as a problem: having zero MIDI issues here, never had any, not when sending it out to trigger hardware, not when recording it to trigger software, not when clicking it together in the editor. You'll have a hard time finding an equally useful and flexible DAW - but you'll have to learn to live with its weird looks (even the themes are usually shite) and the incessant flood of disbelief and/or snide remarks by fellow music makers. It's like a pair of shoes, not every pair fits everyone, and not everyone will lose their ability to walk if they wear a pair that doesn't fit them. But if you find that one pair... that ONE pair... you'll wonder how you've every managed to walk in any other pair. Since Reaper has a very permissive demo restriction (you can just keep clicking the nag screen away after it's expired, this is intentional) I would recommend that you give it a try first, and see what about it you don't like, before you pick another pair of shoes that costs a lot more and looks a bit flashier, but maybe doesn't fit you as well after all, just because someone told you they like it more than Reaper. If you find anything about Reaper that doesn't 'work' for you, at least you'll know what you're looking for in a replacement DAW and you won't have lost any money in finding that out.
And if you find Cubase "slow" and "bloated" then you have to be running on a turtle, because that's just not my experience - on my Desktop or Laptop. I can name some DAWs that absolutely do feel sluggish, like Samplitude Pro X, but Cubase is not one of them.
If you have a turtle PC, then REAPER is definitely the optimal choice for you.
Personally, I find it demotivating software to look at, and use. I used to be a tinnkerer back when I was a ComSci undergrad, but times have changed. I'd rather spend my time doing more productive things than "making my DAW usable."
And I really can't stand looking at REAPER. The most offensive parts of it aren't themeable, so that isn't even a solution (it just makes the UI/UX even MORE inconsistent, which increases the ugly factor).
Reaper users often remind me of a Linux response I saw on sourceforge or similar. Someone asked how to change something about the display for one of the common distros. There were lots of answers of course and easily far and away the favourite ran to a few thousand words about recompiling kernels, building dependencies, developing a workflow to rebuild regularly etc etc. Another answer that was not particularly popular said something like "go up to the top right corner and use the drop down menu that says Settings ...." 
.. Cakewalk by Bandlab... 
