Meadows wrote:For that price, you get the XXL edition of FL Studio complete with half a dozen synths and awesome presets, and still have money left to buy 3-5 more Image-Line synths as extras, ending up with nearly 2000 presets and an easy-to-use, easy-to-learn, powerful interface that also has a large support community. Lifetime free patch/version upgrades for all your synths and the DAW itself.
I haven't used FL Studio, so... But it seems to me that the general opinion is that that's half a dozen (if even that) pretty mediocre synths, and the 3-5 more you can buy for that price is even worse. If you want the relatively good quality stuff you're up in the $150-$200 range per synth. While the quality of the synths out-of-the-box in Reason is very highly regarded. But again, yeah, Reason is not a true DAW. But both your notion about flexibility (which seems to be founded on nothing else than that you can't resize the stack window) and the notion about some sort of being-different statement, doesn't seem very well founded at all.
derFunkenstein wrote:I went with Sonar because the interface is the absolute best available on Windows. Cakewalk's interface has always been pretty solid, going back to Pro Audio 3 on Windows 3.1 and Home Studio 9 on Win2k.
I remember I sat down with Cakewalk 9 (HS or PA or whatever) eons ago, for some recording. At the time, it seemed to be a miracle if you got Cubase to even start, so Cakewalk was nice, I guess. But comparing it to *any* of the software *today*, it was a pretty unstable affair nonetheless. I haven't used the absolute latest, but last I checked it looked and felt pretty much the same, yeah. And what can I say, I like the Reason interface better, and I also feel Reason is so much faster aswell. I feel Cakewalk have hiccups every now and then from ever so slight interaction, where Reason is snappy as hell. But then again, with todays hardware, and the stuff you're looking at, that's probably not an issue.
If live music is to be recorded then, yeah, you're right that Sonar is a much better all-in-one solution. You could probably solve it relatively well with some open source or cheap audio recording utility, and import it into Reason, but it would be a fair bit trickier. But with nothing but a MIDI keyboard, I much rather stick with Reason.