Would anyone be willing to lay out their experiences with DAWs? Preferably free ones? I tried waveform, but I'm thinking I'm going to use Cakewalk. A lot of people say Reaper, but the UI seems lackluster. What do yo think?
I use Ardour on Linux. Everything works pretty great for me. I use the LSP plugins which provide all the basic for free like eq and compression. Then I use Airwindows plugins for all the fun distortion is reverb and color. If ya need a free soft synth I'd use surgeXT it's all ya need.
I mainly record Audio in from synthesizers and real instruments. I also accepted that none of my old windows VTSs would easily work on Linux, so I didn't try to port them. Though I hear folks have had some success with running them in a comparability layer. I moved from Ableton on Windows to Ardour on Fedora Linux.
All is free, though I personally paid for Ardour cause I like to support projects I use. And $40 is still the cheapest daw around.
I use Reaper for all sound/music related stuff, never failed me once. It has real nice selection of plugins, if you want more you can either get free plugins made by reaper community on the forum, or elsewhere. Ui honestly is just perfect for me, I wouldn't have it any other way.
I've been using Reaper daily for 15 years. If you run into any issues that you can't figure out, feel free to reach out, I'm happy to answer questions.
It took me a long time to switch from Cakewalk to Reaper for this very reason. With a little time and practice I learned to love Reaper's streamlined interface.
I'm a noob when it comes to digital music, but I've used LMMS and Ardour before.
I like LMMS a lot, because it's relatively simple, so it doesn't completely overload you with all kinds of features. Unfortunately, this can of course mean that certain features may be missing. For example, if I remember correctly, you can set a given beat (like 3/4 beat and such) and you can also 'automate' changing of that beat during the song, but it will not re-layout the measures to match that beat.
Well, and speaking of automation, LMMS is pretty cool in that regard, because you can automate anything that's got a control in the UI. So, automation means you can have it e.g. turn up the volume at measure 53 over the course of 4 measures and stuff like that.
Ardour is definitely a lot more powerful, a lot more feature-rich. I definitely wasn't at the point, where I could really appreciate that. It was also somewhat less stable, so it would crash every so often. Since it would dutifully restore all your work, I wouldn't call that a deal breaker, but it can be annoying.
Bitwig Studio! Made from former Ableton devs so it's similar but the workflow is amazing for modulation and sound design. Plus Linux support. Not free but you can rent-to-own via splice (you do not need an active splice sounds sub).
Edit: oh and it can also sandbox your plugins (either individually, by company, or all together) so having a vst crash doesn't bring down your whole project.
I used Cakewalk Producer? back up to the mid 2010s. About that time, they made it free and I tried installing and using the free stuff. I had a really solid setup which had worked really well with the older Cakewalk stuff. I just kept getting crashes. It was interrupting my workflow. I basically gave up on the whole thing and music production in general. Sad in retrospect