I'm a convert to Acoustica Mixcraft (as opposed to Harrison Mixbus). To address the OP's point about workflow -- it lets me concentrate more on music creation and less on software than anything else I've used, for whatever that's worth.

As of last winter, I'd gotten at least 300 hours project experience in each of these DAWs:

Cakewalk/ Sonar/ Sonar Platinum (since the late 90s, maybe 2000 hours?)
CoolEditPro/ Adobe Audition
Acid Pro 7
Studio One v2 and v3

and maybe 20-50 hours each in MULab, Mixbus (great sound, but very picky about VSTs on my PC) and RB (I'll just echo what someone else said -- it's buggy, super laggy, and it's only real competitive attraction is RT capability.)

(I’m not the person to ask about Reaper. I hear it is super-powerful, after around 2 hours trying to so some simple things, running into spider webs everywhere, I just exited the program for good. Do a Google image search for “The Scream” ;-) )

Even before Sonar's future was thrown into doubt, I went looking for something better. I'd been hankering to get away from Sonar Platinum anyway because, despite a lot of time within that product family, and despite its amazing spec list (on paper)
a) I found some things just too clunky
b) some crucial things -- like automation, reliable rendering, and midi routing -- just weren't happening;
c) crashed and froze often on my system (a capable and custom-built-for audio Windows 7 64 Pro with tons of RAM, fast i7, good Focusrite interface etc.);
d) the move to monthly updates caused chaos for me, as old workarounds no longer worked, and new ones became necessary due to new bugs; looking back on 2015-2016, I see I ended up writing some very long and painfully detailed forensic reports designed to help forum members / staff replicate my issues. During that time, some projects were 70% music-making, 30% head scratching.

For folks who have had fewer problems with Sonar, I'm glad for you. I know everyone's system-specific mileage may vary; I'll just say that mine in this case was poor.

Looking elsewhere, I'd wanted to love Studio One for its super-intuitive workflow, but on my setup it proved to be too crashy and stubborn about recognising midi keyboards which other DAWs had no problem with. Also it was weak in MIDI.

I'd loved the old Acid Pro but it was only 32 bit.

I've not tried Bandlab, because when Gibson filed for bankruptcy, I read this review of Mixcraft 8 in Sound on Sound magazine

https://www.soundonsound.com/reviews/acoustica-mixcraft-8

so I downloaded the Acoustica Mixcraft 8 trial version, opened up their demo song and pressed play.
After about 10 minutes of mousing around, clicking here, right-clicking there, I was able to figure out enough to get my own big, complex torture-test project going, with lots of heavy Kontakt instruments loaded, midi-generating VSTis routed all over, integrated Melodyne doing its thing, an Ableton-like clip launcher doing another thing, tons of needless FX and automation ;-) i.e. pure adolescent overkill, a giant racket, but loads of fun. It wouldn't crash. Only after about an hour did I have to google for a fast answer to something.

Long story short, I spend 95% of my non-BIAB time in Mixcraft now. I still use Sonar for its better comping workflow, but export the results into Mixcraft.

It has a few shortcomings as a DAW (and the bundled VSTis and FX are hit and miss; but I use 3rd party stuff anyway) but it is quite respectably deep and powerful.

It was put together by the same guys who developed the original Acid for Sonic Foundry, with the same love-thy-user-by-making-things-dead-obvious ethos.

I'd say that if Sonar Platinum's feature list was 10/10, Mixcraft's is around 8.8; that Mixcraft is as intuitive to use as Studio One; and it is the most stable DAW I've used on any of my machines, ever. 90% of the time when it hits a hiccough and freezes (which is not too often), it is temporary, and it recovers; it rarely crashes on me, and when it has, it's recovery system has always worked.

It’s what I fire up when I want to get lots done and have fun.

My long-winded $0.02!


Last edited by lingyai; 01/06/19 02:35 PM.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tDj_VanH3g