Mario made some great points.

In the past what have you used? If you've used a daw in the past you may feel most comfortable staying within the same daw family. For instance if you've used Cubase, GarageBand, MultiTrack Studio or another daw you may want to stay with products made by the same company.

Another question is do you want to use a Microsoft or Apple operating system?

While thinking about what hardware and operating system you want I would visit the web sites of daws I'm interested in, download whatever demo software is available, look at screenshots, lurk on the daw forums and look through the pdf manuals. How intuitive is it to do things you will be doing all the time like select a section, zoom-in, zoom-out, copy, cut, trim, delete, move, etc. Does it work with midi, audio, loops? What effects are built-in? How difficult is it to use third party soft synths or effects? In short, does the software work the way YOU think or will you always be fighting the software?


Jim Fogle - 2025 BiaB (Build 1128) RB (Build 5) - Ultra+ PAK
DAWs: Cakewalk Sonar - Standalone: Zoom MRS-8
Laptop: i3 Win 10, 8GB ram 500GB HDD
Desktop: i7 Win 11, 12GB ram 256GB SSD, 4 TB HDD
Music at: https://fogle622.wix.com/fogle622-audio-home