Also, please answer the following questions -
What did you select? (If you selected 'Something else', please mention the program here.)
Ardour. I seem to be at home with that DAW, although it's still in its beta, and is a bit buggy.
What work do you do? (film scoring, recording bands, professionally or as a hobby, etc)
I'm creating my own music, experimenting with sounds and chords, as a hobby
You mainly deal with - audio, MIDI, or both?
Both.
What else have you tried earlier before settling on your current choices? What caused you to leave from your previous programs? Are you looking to shift to a different program from your current one?
Is there anything you find missing in your current program, or something you wish was improved?
In the past several years I've tried a lot of music software. On Windows my favorits were Cubase and Reaper, but Cubase in the first place. I guess that's why I like Ardour over Qtractor. Ardour seems more logical to me when dealing with tracks. I left the previous programs cause I left Windows altogether.
As far as is there anything missing in the current program, what I find missing is a decent notation editor inside the DAW, so that I wouldn't have to export MIDI from, say, MuseScore in Linux or Finale/Sibelius in Windows and then import them in the DAW, because I'd like to compose it on the spot, if there's something I don't like - to correct it in the very score, and not dealing with all those lines in the piano roll. Also, since I'm used to notation reading and writing as seeing music visually, it's easier for me to have overall look on the whole song when it's notated. to see how the bass is moving against the piano chords or the drums, what scale is going over some chord etc.
But, I guess it's hard to be done, since no program has done it to fulfill all the following criteria:
- To be fully integrated in the DAW - every notation mark to have it's impact on the MIDI data.
- To be easy to use, as in MuseScore or Finale, where you can type the music as you type words on your keyboard.
- To be visually apealing (not that very much important, but still)
So far the closest are Cubase on Windows and Rosegarden on Linux. But if MuseScore would think of providing a possibility to have a MIDI out for every part in the score, then all my wishes would be satisfied, because with the JACK I'd put together a beautiful, frankenstein like DAW of my dreams. It would be a bit more complicated than having it all in one software, but I'd live with using gedit to write down some settings for reopening it all together.
You don't want to know how many ideas got stacked up through the years on a myriad of different media (computers, phones, mp3 players, cassettes).
(this smiley applies to the sentence as a whole so not just the Germknödel).