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Best DAW (FREE) for beginners! :D

#62
The best free DAW IMO is Cakewalk by Bandlab. It is a fully functional DAW, that is essentially Sonar Platinum, just without the 3rd party plug ins, you'd get if you bought SPLAT under Gibson's ownership. It's very user friendly, stable, and not a resource hog. Now this all said, I'm biased, because after ditching Pro Tools I went with SPLAT and never looked back, so the transition to CWBL just made sense. I would also recommend Reaper, and had Bandlab not bought Sonar from Gibson, would have gone that route.
 
#65
I was using Audacity - but found I needed to comp (or punch in = yuck) some "fixes" on a couple tracks :( and then I found out you can actually comp with Audacity :) . So so far I've not found anything I need to do that it can't do. I'm presently recording a couple albums with a couple different bands (30+ songs). I'm using a Zoom Livetrak L-20 and L-8 to record with so bounce tracks back and forth between those and Audacity. Dunno what it's like to actually record in Audacity but I hear it works OK.

One of the bands, it's their 4th album and the plan on that one is for me to only "track" the drums (8 tracks), bass, acoustic guitar, and lead vocal and send the tracks to another guy (who has a DAW and did one of their other albums) who wants to spend the megahours to add more tracks and mix down. I have been doing my own "scratch" mixdowns on the 11 tracks that I have recorded so far in Audacity, takes about 1/2 hour per song to do that using a dynamics processor and reverb plug-ins
 
#66
Been using Reaper of late but I find I have to line tracks up after recording on my PC. No issues on my iPad. Not sure what causes that. I did notice when using loops, the tracks lined up. Not with standalone audio files. Maybe I'm missing a step. I'm using a Scarlet Solo interface. I'm going to try the Cakewalk/Sonar DAW and see how that goes.

Edit: I forgot to mention, I also have N-Track on my iPad. It's cheaper than Reaper (if you pay for it. $29 full cost). It's a full featured DAW. Non paying version has limited tracks available, IIRC.
 
#68
Previously I was using Cubase 4, which came with my Presonus Audiobox USB. After getting a new PC, Cubase stopped recognizing the Audiobox (yes, I updated the driver), so I looked for other options. Based on recommendations on here, I downloaded Reaper, and honestly, I found the learning curve a bit steep. So I went to the Presonus site and downloaded Studio One Prime, which is free. It does everything I need to do and I had it figured out in minutes. Probably just how my brain works, but some food for thought.
 
#70
I use Cakewalk under Win, which is also rather powerful with the pro channel feat.

Reaper is excellent and also nimbler, probably more stable too. If you need to exchange projects with someone with a Mac or you might consider switching platforms or go back and forth between different systems, this IMO is the way to go. It's also more used (if I'm not wrong) than Cakewalk, so chances are you can have other people open your projects more easily, plugins aside.

I'm not necessarily a fan of skeumorphism and minimalist design is fine, but I tried Tracktion once a few months ago and the UI puzzled me big time.

Given the free options available in 2020, I'd skip any "lite" version from the likes of Studio One, Pro Tools and so on, which have built-in in deal-breaking limitations such as limited number of tracks, no VST support (!!!) and so on which is better to think of before even installing than in the middle of an open project... A bit like when you spend some time with a freemium image/video editor and you then realise you can only do useless exports with watermarks and so on.
 
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