I grabbed the demo (@56kb/sec) and loaded her up. Yet another set of terms to sort out in my head. One thing I can't find is Ripple Edit. Does it do this?

bitflipper
Yeh, you're right: you'd be wrong about that. Digital recording predates electronic music. Although that is likely the focus of most home DAW users today.
 
I'd also question the assertion that electronic music has never been as popular here as it is in Europe. If you're talking about the last decade, and specifically EDM, then yes. It's also extremely popular in Asia. But synthesizer-based music started in America with Switched On Bach and Snowflakes are Dancing (yes, the latter is a Japanese artist but no one in his home country knew what to do with him so he turned to Carlos' American distributor). And of course, the synthesizer itself was born in America.

 
I would question and refute both of these assertions. The first electronic music was created and performed in the first half of the 20th century, using weird precursors of the synthesizer like the theremin. Even Walter/Wendy Carlos's "Switch on Albums" were recorded on analog tape. Digital recording really didn't come about until the late 70s.
 
And, even though the true real commercial synthesizers were invented in the U.S., purely electronic music itself never caught on here. We never had the equivalent of Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream. Synthesizers were used as keyboards in numerous bands, but there were always guitars and basses and drums there as well. Even disco songs weren't electronic in nature--most of the hits were lushly orchestrated. There was never a huge demand for electronic music in the U.S. outside of  dance clubs, college radio stations or new age health spas. At best it had niche poprularity.  Even in the synth-heavy 1980s, all of those bands were either British or from the Continent. 
 

bitflipper
 
At the risk of getting political, innovation in the US has been hurt by the domination of large corporations over, well, everything. Finland, Sweden, Germany, The Netherlands - they still encourage entrepreneurship. Startups and small businesses have a hard time getting a foothold here, because they pay taxes like an individual. No Panamanian tax shelters for them, no sweetheart tax breaks, no tax credit handouts, no subsidies. And then there's the incessant burden of health care costs. All because small businesses have no political leverage.

 
Lordy, lord, I so want to refute these "political" arguments, but this is the wrong category to do it. I would be happy to continue the debate in whatever place on this forum allows for such discussions.  
 

Yes, it does ripple editing, I think by default but you can toggle it off and on.

Be aware that you cannot drag and drop an audio file onto the timeline to set the project tempo from the audio file,
like we can do in Sonar and SOP.
 
Kraznet did say he would send a feature request to the devs for this.
It is a competitive feature so I'm sure it will get implemented before too long.
 

Yup. We've taken it for granted that we can create a tempo map from any old audio file. Going back to SONAR 6, IIRC. Probably won't be the last thing you'll miss from SONAR. I hope it gets implemented (just wait till we SONAR users get confident enough to start asking for things over there! Look out.), but fortunately it's not a showstopper for me.
 
Well, actually, nothing's a showstopper yet because SONAR remains my primary DAW. Samplitude's just a sideline project. But so far it's ticked all the boxes except for this one thing, which I hadn't noticed until your post over there. Figures, a drummer would pick up on that one but not a keyboard player.

bitflipper
Yes, it does ripple editing, I think by default but you can toggle it off and on.

I went through the manual and did a keyword search but no luck, still can't figure it out.

Deleted. (S.L.I.P. beat me to it).
 

More discoveries:
 
DX plugs (Sonitus) are turned off by default.
Here is how to enable DX plugs:

Edit "Sam_X64.ini".  (located in "C:\ProgramData\MAGIX\Samplitude Pro X3 Suite")
Insert this line under [setup]:

NoDirectXInit=0

It should look like this when you are done:

[Setup]
NoDirectXInit=0
NoASIOBoost=1
MidiInDontUseSysex=1
 
/***********************************************/
 
Don't forget to add the dx folder path: "C:\Program Files\Cakewalk\Shared Plugins"
The Sonitus compressor and gate do not work because of the incompatible method of sidechaining that Cakewalk implemented.