For what its worth, this old dog started with Cakewalk back in one of the MIDI only versions, and I’ve stayed with it all through the years, even when it looked like it was dead and buried. If you never have much use for MIDI, I guess any old DAW will do, but I’ve done so much with MIDI it’s the first thing I look at in a DAW. When it looked like Cakewalk was gone forever, I looked around briefly and some DAWS had no midi implementation at all and most of the rest were poor compared to Sonar. To be honest, I didn’t really think that Cakewalk was going to remain free for ever when BandLab revived it. I also saw long ago that things were forming up for most if not all software companies to move to a subscription model. I’m gladly paying the BandLab membership fee and using Sonar ostensively for free as a perk of my membership (yeah, it’s still a subscription). If you look at the yearly membership, and think back to how much we used to pay every year for the next upgrade, we are actually getting off cheaper now. And that’s not even accounting for inflation. I got a discount this year and paid abut $100 for the membership ($125?). By comparison, BIAB isn’t subscription and with yearly 2025 upgrade, extras, and taxes I paid $357 and change. I know that everyone detests subscriptions, but you are usually paying less a year than when we had to purchase a lifetime license, plus you are getting continuous updates instead of having to wait until the end of the year for a rushed out and buggy program. I know there are other strong opinions out there, but that’s mine.

Keith
2025 Audiophile Windows 11 RYZEN THREADRIPPER 3960X 4.5GHZ 128 GB RAM 2 Nvidia RTX 3090s, Vegas,Acid,SoundForge,Izotope Production,Melodyne Studio,SONAR,3 Raven Mtis