How did you decide on the DAW you're using?

[crushingpetal]

It's there, I have it, it works, it does what I need it to do, I'm no expert, I have no issues with it, sunk cost plays a part, and I have no desire to bother changing.

Yeah, that would really be my only advice: if you get a DAW + plugins that you work well with, don't change anything. Avoid the relentless upgrade cycles, they're not there to actually help you.

 

[TheWarAgainstTime]

I recorded a demo of a song at a friend's place to show my band at the time and he was using Studio One 2. It seemed mostly intuitive to me as he walked me through some of the core functions while we were tracking. By contrast, he was more comfortable using FL Studio for programing midi drums and nothing about it seemed to make sense to me. Fast forward 5 or so years and I bought Studio One 4 when I wanted to start learning to record on my own. I was able to mostly figure out the basics on my own and I've stuck with it as I've been doing more advanced stuff. I held off on upgrading to version 5 since there weren't many big changes that affected my normal use cases, but bought version 6 shortly after it was released.


Before Studio One, I briefly tried Reaper since it was free. It was okay, but I couldn't seem to wrap my head around the UI or setting up different routing options like busses or send/post effects. I've also tried a few versions of Ableton at my old drummer's place over the years and it always seems ass backwards to me

 

[bmtf]

i got into ableton live cause of peer pressure. the other kids are filthy

 

[LeftOurEyes]

I got Pro Tools 10 and 11 free when I bought an eleven rack like over 10 years ago and have been using that ever since. I had to figure out some things but it was mostly intuitive just looking through the options.

I recorded this past week at a friends house using Reaper and oh man did I hate it. I literally couldn't figure out how to do almost anything. I couldn't even get both inputs armed. I was recording an acoustic guitar, and was using a mic on one input and going direct on the second. I ended up just recording the micd input twice on accident and never could figure out how to get the second input to record the direct track. Instead of wasting my time trying to learn basic things in Reaper, I am just taking my desktop over next time and recording into Pro Tools. I also find the way the plugin menu is set up for tracks to just be weird to me coming from Pro Tools.

 

[Bloody_Inferno]

I started with Garageband so the eventual transition to Logic Pro was, for lack of a better word, logical. I do use Pro Tools from time to time but nowhere near as fluent as I am with Logic.