It seems to me each DAW focuses on a particular problematic.
- Ableton Live: focus on painless transition between live and written electronic music, quick producing
- Reason: focus on modulating everything with a studio feel
- Orion: focus on cleanly mixing looping music, slow producing
- FLStudio: focus on composing looping music
- Reaper: focus on customization and performance
- Protools: focus on getting the most money out of the customer
- Logic: focus on getting the sound you want and making a song easily, pre-made effect chains
- Studio One: a bit similar to Logic in spirit
- Cubase: I don't know what it focuses on tbh
A major problematic is that the topdown goal of making one song may easily be dwarfed by mixing difficulties that can then capture your focus forever (aka "loopitis").
As an audio plugin developer, I get to know a bit of every
DAW out there, for testing. A popular opinion is that tools don't matter for making music, but a more realistic opinion is that they actually do matter, by warping how you think about the problem.
> Fountain pens want to connect letters. Ballpoint pens need to be convinced to write.
It takes serious effort at times to force a ballpoint pen to actually write. Which has the effect of turning off people to writing and ruining the quality of written material.
I find it best to always acknowledge that there may be a better tool for the task you're trying to do at any moment, and realize the point at which you should go and search for that tool.
But as Rumsfeld would say, the unknown unknowns are what you need to worry about. That is, the case where you don't know the tool you're using is limiting you, and in what ways.
Renoise: incredibly accurate timing. Yes demoscene music makers, but it's also exceptional at producing anything that's got to have incredibly tight timing. It even excels at sending MIDI data without jitter.
Also, as the heir apparent of the tracker movement (its audio can be a heck of a lot better than the early generations of trackers, and it's happy to work with multichannel DACs for outboard analog mixing) it offers a distinct way of thinking about sound-making: that old 'tracker' way of composing. Since it's based on audio samples of arbitrary fidelity, it's not restricted to 'demo-y' sounds: you can just as well use huge 24-bit high sample rate sounds, or use it as a way of layering audio tracks as one might in a DAW.
I'm not involved with Renoise as a company, BTW, but I AM completely charmed by it and own both it and Redux (the DAW plugin version).
Yes a thousand times, dude, Renoise is that good. It's my main DAW and I feel really spoiled by it, specially by its incredible stability.
Everytime I read articles or forum posts about people talking about their DAWs I hear people complaining about ableton/fl studio etc being unstable, crashing on odd occasions etc. I have never experienced a crash on Renoise, not even using multiple VSTs etc, even some buggy ones that are prone to crashing or scrambling other DAW's internal state hehehe... I have composed tracks on Renoise for over 6 hours to only them realize I hadn't saved a single time.