I have Mixcraft 5 that I sort of bought on a whim and didn't think things through very well as others above have said you should. I was having a problem with rendering to .wav both in BIAB and RB and I wanted a daw that had the capability of multiple midi tracks that another pgm that I had been using for a lot of years, WavePad, did not have. However, I was not and still am not very knowledgeable about daw's. I chose Mixcraft because I thought it looked easier than some others I had looked at such as Reaper. It's not too difficult and there's a forum that I got some help from on some things, but not always. For whatever reason, I am unable to render directly to mp3 with BIAB or RB could be due to my ext synth setup. I do like the soft synth in Mixcraft though even as compared to Coyote Forte. I did stumble across another pgm, DBpoweramp Music converter, that I really like to convert from .wav to mp3 because you can up the quality of the sampling rate. Now, having said all of this, I still consider myself a rookie on this stuff. However, I just got a new desktop and I like Mixcraft well enough to get it installed on the new puter. FWIW

Stan

Cornet Curmudgeon