the4thImpulse wrote:Ableton hands down with its live applications in session view, at least thats where my vote still stands after using most of the major DAWs in my engineering classes.
It does all come down to personal preference, operating system (in some cases), and most importantly workflow. I liked FLs when I first started but once I got good enough to do more advanced stuff I felt it really held me back. Pro tools and Nuendo are best with audio, not midi, imo.
Cubase/Nuendo are pretty solid with MIDI but there is a lot of workaround type stuff that needs done for it to be stable, the drum programmer is horrid, and I know most producers who use cubase completely ignore it, and will customize the heck out of the piano roll editor so all the bar lines are visible.
Logic is amazing at MIDI, with lots of control over quantization and general flexibility, and MIDI transformation control. It also has a little known feature that captures what you play during MIDI playback, a silent record if you will, that if you jam out an idea during playback, instead of trying to remember it you hit the key combo and it pastes what you just played in as if you were recording. But Logic requires a Mac.
Ableton is perfectly capable, as above, but certainly has a focus on clip launching and building songs up with blocks rather than individual ideas, which can make composition of less linear pieces a little more challenging, or so I have heard. When I used Reaper I thought the MIDI implementation was dreadful, but that was years ago.