REAPER. 
 
Cost me $60 more than Sonar, but it was worth it. 

sharke
REAPER. 
 
Cost me $60 more than Sonar, but it was worth it. 

Reaper is impressive.  I did a deep dive period and couldn't find a thing to complain about.  I'm deep diving Studio One for a while now.
 

Yeah Reaper is the most powerful and well designed DAW I've ever used. 
 
However I'm guessing the $60 price tag sells a lot of licenses among people who want to get into producing music without a large outlay. If Sonar is now free, it might take some of Reaper's market share. Especially as on the surface, Sonar has a shallower learning curve. 

I doubt there will be any harm to Reaper.  They really are two totally different worlds

sharke
REAPER.
Cost me $60 more than Sonar, but it was worth it.

I've always felt like Reaper's price worked against it.  I think, rightly or wrongly, people associate price with value.  IMHO if Reaper were priced like other DAW's it would be highly esteemed.  As it is I feel like it gets dismissed out of hand.  Sad.

It's not the price that kills Reaper.  Reaper is the best made DAW sans GUI there ever was.
 
A drop dead beautiful interface, something that did not look like, "Audacity's" cousin from Fargo..   would have gone a
long way to making Reaper one of the most popular daws ever.
 
But I have a license to Reaper.  I dunno why..  cause it was only $60.   Nobody ever said that Justin was stupid.  He's like the nicest dude.  He responds to the support emails - or at least still did back years ago the last time I needed help with something.  

I am officially dumping Sonar today. Giving it away just makes pirates look like visionaries. Anderton was applauding this move but he always said pirates were killing the industry. What a steaming pile this has become. 

BobF
I doubt there will be any harm to Reaper.  They really are two totally different worlds

This is why I use them in conjunction with each other.
 
Also, howdy.
 
The Rect is working fabulously for my rhythm guit plan. So much so I reconfig'd my mix to only have a single rth guit soft panned (instead of doubled and hard panned) against the lead guit track.
 
Can't thank you enough.
 
Cheers!

Just did a bunch of things for a friend in Reaper that could have not been done in anything else without introducing deterioration and artifacts. Heathen christian shifting previous CD tracks of missionary songs to the Solfeggio reference to get everybody healed and washed in the blood. Can do it in Reaper with no deterioration since Reaper controls the computer clock and requires no resampling in a pitch shift. Nothing else currently can do this task. Nothing.
 
GUI and price comments are correct. Sell Reaper for $400 dollars and it will be up there with whatever.
GUI of the included effects mostly a chuckle, specific with the Jesusonic plugs native to the install. Idea is if Jesus were alive now and a guitar banger, what quality of plugins would he expect. Thus the JS line. Really interesting things. Bare bones footprint and you can easily edit the text files to tweak or create your own plug.
 
Downside from the aesthetic point is that the stripped down JS plugs are butt ugly. Just some sliders. Same appearance JS to JS and only a step above DOS.
 
Many users have written hi class cloaks for some of the JS plugs, a top quality flanger glowing like a 1950's Cadillac, really elegant. Now the JS plug is up there with the best professional commercial products. Not because it works better but because it looks better.
 
Reaper is way more cool than cool if you can get past some of the looks that turn off so many.
 
John
 

Personally I quite like the look of Reaper. Like many I always thought it looked ugly, but that's mainly down to how it looks when you load it with a blank project. In truth though, once you get a large project in there with all the tracks color coded and everything, it looks great. Even with the default theme. I think it looks very clean and orderly. True some of the dialogs and windows have that old Windows look about them, but their functionality is so much better than in Sonar that I don't even care. The automation parameter selection window for instance. It's like the answer to my dreams, even though it looks kinda no-frills. 
 
The look of the native plugins don't bother me because I don't use them. However I have used a couple of the MIDI plugins and the sequencer. The sequencer looks kinda ugly to be honest, but in functionality it's right up there with Geist! I love it!