Waveform Free 13

It's free DAW with ability to use an external VST. Not only that GUI it's quite nonstandard, it's difficult to work with. I understand author desire for minimalist GUI, I am not against that idea but it's execution is not good.

Stability is bad, last version crashing often and no update in last 4 months. While it can run VST in box so faulty VST will not kill DAW, box often crashes with all your VST running. Same VST run in other DAWs without crashing. Complaining at forum is all what people can do. Developers do not care, do not even think about buying Pro version and giving them money.

DAW itself has pretty impressive feature set, including macros. Provided stock VST effects do not sound well, but we are probably used to it. You can buy essential effect pack or it's included in pro version. It will have same sound but you get much nicer GUI and more configurable options. You will also get few instruments as you can expect. Some of them do not sound too bad, but they are pretty generic and since there are no community shared patches for them, just ignore them.

DAW is designed for composing. It's not bad for that. For mixing should be avoided, authors can't even deliver decent VU meter and volume slider with numbers. While I understand focus on composing, You should not try to deliver worst mixing experience in industry. Volume slider and meter are in track area shared with instruments and inserts. If you add more stuff like 2 inserts area will shrink into two rows and guess what - volume slider and meter shrinks too making any reading of volume levels very difficult. There are lot of problems related to non intuitive UI which surface during mixing. Do not ever think you will record and mix here. If you want to mix for free Cakewalk will do well, it has amazing channel strip.

Final verdict: After many years Waveform user base is still very tiny, sell this product to other developers, these guys are not going to make it. It has features and few interesting ideas but it's not executed well. Don't ever think buying Pro version.