Your Choice of DAW?

[Legion Kreinak]

Sonar is actually a little inconvenient on my dual monitor arrangement because my second monitor is in portrait orientation. Sonar contains all of the panels (but not plug-in displays, fortunately) within a single master window, so I either have to waste space on the portrait monitor or resize the master window so that the status bar along the bottom (which includes the save/load progress bar and the global mute/solo status) is off-screen on the main monitor. I really wish everything was free-floating.

I should add, I personally have only one monitor right now, but I've worked in a friends studio where he had a tri setup, and I've also had dual-monitors for gaming in the past.

That does sound like a nuisance, though. I used FL Studio on the multi-monitor setup and it seemed fine.

[OverCoat]

I did not know that they could be used with VST instruments.

Renoise is actually the most stable VSTi host I know of... which is funny, most people wouldn't think of a tracker doing that. A couple years back in the #renoise IRC channel I talked with dBlue a lot and he uses Renoise personally, he also used it as the main reference for bugfixes while making the ever-popular Glitch plugin.

However, most trackers do NOT support VST, mainly because the legacy music formats [it/xm/s3m/mod/etc] predate VST. However, Renoise is not a legacy tracker.

[Skyline Drop]

Overcoat, do you ever get this nasty glitch running multiple instances of sfz in Renoise? For a song I was working on earlier, I had three instances going, and when they tried to play a note, they spat out this miserably loud static instead. I tried cutting down the volume and throwing a limiter on each track, but they managed to break through and still kill my ears every time until I gave up. I need to buy the full version so I can render parts down...

[OverCoat]

That's a problem with sfz being horrible I think, I had problems with sfz in Fruityloops too, though FL has the only good soundfont loader in the universe, so I never used sfz with that.

I haven't used soundfonts in like 8 years though, why are you?

[Sixto]

I do all the piano roll stuff in FL, but all my recording and mixing in Cubase 5.

[alfredofreak]

I'm in the same boat as Malkyre. I've used ACID Music Studio for a couple years to make some entertaining loop-based stuff (like this and this with virtually no proper mixing), but I'll be demoing DAWs for a while so I can start making some real stuff.

Ableton's got a pretty nice fully functional trial version that'll give you 2 weeks with no strings attached.

On a side note, Live now offers a fully functional 30 day trial.