Cockos Reaper

Pro: Up and running in no time!! Plenty of quick help from the Reaper community (forum is great). You can run this DAW from a Thumb Drive if you wanted (portable studio in your pocket). Supports Rewire,VST,VSTi and many more (even comes with serval of it's own plugins that sound great). Easy load on PCU resources, so you can run many more plugins or have more available track counts than most other DAWs without a monster computer build. Video editing capable, surround sound mixing environment...and many more tricks under the hood! Best of all it's a top contender against some of the BIG boys (Pro Tools, Logic, Cubase...etc), but at a fraction of the price!!! You can't beat the price/value anywhere else.

Cons: Midi is the only down side to REAPER (compared to FL Studio and Cubas), but it has steadily improved and is now VERY usable and can get the job done with ease.

Check it out for yourself...you'll thank me later.

CouRea

CEO: Solo Production Squad

cons: when you want to learn how to do something in Reaper, you have to disrupt your workflow and go ONLINE to download a stupid manual, and by the time you search for it, download it, find out what you wanted to learn from it, and decided on where to store the manual on your computer, you completely disrupted your workflow. Can you believe that? It's 2013 and this dumb program doesn't even self-contain a pdf manual. Give me a break.

Also, like Cubase, 'Logic' (funny name) etc, it's incredibly crazy. To learn how to quantize a few bars of midi I had to tear my hair off, 'cause in the dumb 'manual' , when you enter a search term like 'quantize midi' (makes sense, right? ) comes up with ZERO results.

These problems were never created by musicians, they were created by computer nerds, and it shows every time.