To me the difference between cakewalk and studio is personal,choice. Both work well. I have track many projects in both programs. Studio one seems to handle things in a slightly and mean slightly simpler approach. I like the way studio one has a simpler setup when you open it. Yes I know you can template cakewalk to open up to you custom screen template, but after fussing with it for over an hour one day I got nothing that was saved. I don’t like the pro channel on each track in cake. It is cluttered and confusing. I like the signal chain capability of studio one. Simple and straightforward. Studio one does a video track as well. Nice feature. It also has a mastering page to finish a album like project. Lastly it comes with far superior plugins. Yes you pay for them. But they are really good. I don’t like the sonitus stuff when compared to the studio one plugins.

As mentioned above studio one is cross platform so I can run the exact same program on my Mac and my win laptop.

If cake goes to a paid system then to me it is a non starter for me. Cake is only interesting since it is free. For paid I want more than it offers.

Is cake a good DAW? Yes very good. Especially for free. And it was free since it stripped out the extra content. I want the extra content. I want a full suite of native plugins, a nice library of sounds.

I do agree cakes comping is really cool, but studio ne does almost the exact same thing. You just have to know it’s workflow. I love you can template even at that level. Jeff Pettit showed me a while back how to setup a one button arrangement that opened up a track and eight comping tracks for dragging the BiaB plugins original multiriff output this was so cool. One click and you could comp a finished lead track.

Finally it falls to familiarity. Which are used to. For me I started on cake and have used it a lot, so familiar. I Switched to studio one simple because it was for my mind more intuitive. For someone else like my friend Misha, he things differently, so cake is more intuitive to him. This just personal opinion.

HP Win 11 12 gig ram, Mac mini Sonoma with 16 gig of ram, BiaB/RB 2026, Reaper 7, Harrison Mixbus 11 , Presonus Audiobox USB96