Let me address a few of these questions and comments, again with my thanks for your interest.

Yes, I do a lot of just plain stereo editing for clients. I do even more for myself to make my composer demos.

John Ford, thanks, I did get Diamond Cut Pro on your recommendation. It's an especially good tool for noise removal. I'll take another look now that you say it handles VSTs to see if that includes my newer ones.

Larry, -1 for annoying hoops in all things Steinberg. But I have Dorico (tried it, still don't like it) so it wasn't too bad the second time around.

Silvertones, I use multiband compressors and I use them from a plugin. My ancient Adobe Audition doesn't recognize my newer plugins, and this is one of my two main reasons for a change.

BlueAttitude, the other main reason I want to change is too many abrupt crashes when I forget to unzoom. If you make the mistake of zooming and previewing a portion of the song (especially in multitrack mode) and you don't stop playback before the end of the selected section, bang, gone. Recovery might or might not bring it back. Does that happen to you? Very annoying.

Bud, perhaps the concept of 'master a group of songs' refers to how I handle mastering to burn a CD. I use the program CD Architect, which allows adjustment of each song so the project is coherent throughout. My favorite technique is to pretend I have an old turntable, where you pick up the needle and set it down anywhere. Does it have coherence in terms of volume and energy wherever you set the needle down, or does one song blast you out where another makes you want to turn up volume? Or 'mastering a group' might mean something entirely different...

About Studio One, which several have mentioned, thanks. I did try that when SONAR went defunct temporarily. I have moved back to Cakewalk by Bandlab. Otherwise, I would have stayed with Mixcraft 9. But I did not evaluate Studio One for its use as a stereo editor. Likewise for the stereo editing features of any other DAW. As I'm an expert in Adobe Audition, I never considered using a DAW for this, instead thinking I would just update my stereo editor.

Apologies for any other major points I did not address. Thank you all.

BIAB 2025 Win Audiophile. Software: Studio One 7 Pro, Swam horns, Acoustica-7, Notion 6, Song Master Pro, Win 11 Home. Hardware: Intel i9, 32 Gb; Roland Integra-7, Presonus 192 & Faderport 8, Royer 121, Adam Sub8 & Neumann 120 monitors.