Even without having tried out Cakewalk, I know the stock answer: the one which fits your needs, and you have to know what they are. But I'll try to get specific and hope that experienced users might help. Since there was no trial version of Music Creator, I just downloaded the big version of Sonar X2 to try out for 30 days. I wonder if someone else has done that and ended up happily using Music Creator, or if you are frustrated not having the features of the pro versions. I've written and performed a lot of songs and want to record them with the two other musicians in the band in better audio quality than live recording. Also I'd like to do some solo projects with a combination of real guitar and some virtual instruments. I've tried out a lot of entry-level software, liked the audio quality of Cubase LE 4 and the presets for vocal compression and reverb. It also has multi-take function and editing of lanes, which is a must-have feature to edit real instrument recordings, take the best and slice and dice to improve the timing. To avoid going into detail, the results are ok but it's a constant struggle to get the program to do what I want.

I dare to say that Music Creator is a good choice if you're not quite sure about what/how much you want and your needs are as you described. I'm not 100% sure if MC has layers/lanes, though.

If it doesn't, the X2 Essential could be the one.

There is no difference in sound quality between DAWs. The sound quality is defined by your mics, instruments and soundcard/AD converters.

X2 trial is actually a little more "crippled" than the full version of MC6 is.  you get more features and plugins by buying MC6 than you do with X2 trial.

MC6 does have layers available in it.  it's an excellent program for the money.

and it's only $40 download and if you find you need more features and plugins, you can always upgrade with a discount.

MC 6 is a fine way to get started. The demo version of X2, as Beagle said, will have more stuff shut off than working.  In MC6 you will have more then enough stuff to record music.

I worked using MC4 for about 3 years. Listen to the music on my website. Much of the earlier stuff was recorded on MC4 with some of the newer stuff being on X1 essentials. I use the same features in X1e as I did in MC4. 

I do recommend starting with MC6. If you can get the box version, I would do that as opposed to the DL version. There is ...or was.... more stuff on the disk simply due to the sheer size of the library of sounds sample when it comes to the DL. 

Thanks, Kalle, Beagle and Herb, Sounds like good solid advice. Appreciate you sharing examples of your music recorded with the software. To give you an idea of where I am right now, I put a children's song for Christmas online last week at www.singadream.com/candle.htm I want to get away from the canned background and get the voices synced better. The project was done with Cubase LE 4 and it was a struggle all the way.

Sounds like you have a good idea where you want to go..... that's half the journey right there. 

MC can provide the tools to get you further down the road.

just FYI - I'm not sure Music Creator is going to be any "less of a struggle" than Cubase LE was.

they all have their learning curves.

Maybe I've tried out too many things in too short a time, point made. But without the dissatisfaction, I would have never landed here. Cubase has good monitoring tools to hear different takes, but the screen jumps around each time unless you make some special setting I haven't figured out. The test I've made with different software is how efficiently it communicates with my old JV 1010 sound module, maybe an esoteric issue. In Sonar, it takes more steps to get it rolling, but it seems to work more reliably. The only thing I didn't like is that after selecting an instrument, the name isn't displayed anywhere, so if I try something else and forget what the first choice was, it could be hard to get back to the original instrument. But altogether, so far, so good.

are you talking about the patch name?

that's a matter of inserting the correct INS DEF for the JV 1010, however, MC doesn't allow that functionality.  you have to upgrade to Sonar X2 Essentials for INS DEF capability.

I believe MC 6 does allow IDs.