I won a copy of Deluxe Music for Amiga in a music competition when I was a kid; I'd made the winning track in MED or OctaMED, and kept using MED/OctaMED even after winning Deluxe Music.

I found Deluxe Music cartoonish and not capable of doing what I wanted. I dismissed it almost immediately. It felt like wearing gloves to compose after coming from trackers, where you had tick-precision (this was sort of a weird combination of interrupts and the BPM of your song, I don't remember the details now) control over everything like volume, pitch, arpeggiation, the Paula filter, etc.

I think it's worth noting that Deluxe Music is distinctly not what modern DAWs look like, while Cubase kinda sorta is. Deluxe Music brought traditional music notation into the computer, which was great for folks who were comfortable with it, but you lose a lot of control and information visibility when you do that. And, of course, it requires your user to have some sort of formal music education.

There are still tools that'll work with traditional music notation, but very few people use them for composition. There's millions of copies of DAWs using a Cubase-ish sequencer-style interface in use every day.

Oh, man: MED and then OctaMED (when it eventually landed on a magazine cover CD) were my trackers of choice for creating music for the games I was always tinkering with back in the early 90s, and arguably the reason I got back into music production as hobby in the late noughties.

If you find yourself wanting to play with trackers today, Renoise is the modern spiritual successor of MED and ProTracker and the like, and it's really great, and is competitive with modern DAWs in that it supports VSTs and controllers and automation and such. SunVox is also super cool, but for different reasons...it's more of a minimalist tool.

Seconding this. Renoise is amazing. And extremely affordable compared to other DAWs.

I originally picked it because its demo version doesn't have any of the more extreme limitations that make it very hard to actually create something. Only WAV export is disabled, which is fairly easy to work around if you must. Buying the license is totally worth it though, because it's cheap and you get the ability to easily records part of a track to another sample/instrument, which is a great workflow. Being somewhat familiar with trackers was also a nice bonus, of course.

Thanks for the recommendation - there's still something appealing to me about the tracker way of working (and it's only €68!).