I spent a good chunk of time with both Samplitude and Studio One as demos in December. They're both excellent programs. I did see a little more CPU usage in them compared to SONAR, especially Samplitude. That's important to me when doing big projects and soft synths. I need to be able to play in a low latency environment. I still so really like SONAR and we will continue using it at work as long as we can, but corporate is forcing Win 10 on us later this year and that adds the risk of an update crippling the program which would be a disaster for us being a broadcast facility. We are leaning towards Reaper here for various reasons, CPU usage, recognizing DX plug-ins, and integration of Adobe Audition. But one of the main ones is I've been able to customize it to work and look like SONAR which would mean a very short learning curve for the other producers here....a lot of work for me to get to that point and train them, but I get paid for that. So yes it can be considered a "love in", but for me there was no other program out there that allowed for this. Studio One doesn't support DX the way we need it, Samplitude does but it's quirky and quite frankly that program is overkill for our needs. 
 
 

clintmartin
 
I believe I'll upgrade to Waveform 9 today. Tracktion is fun to use and simple.

I just upgraded to Waveform 9 for $50 and it is a nice refresh. The best new features that I can see are the chord track and the new multi-sampler. 
 
An integrated sampler for sample manipulation, and not just playback of sample libraries is something that many mainstream DAWs lack.   So this feature is sure to appeal to many, and is a frequent feature request. 

Multi Sampler is a general purpose sampler instrument. While it looks simple and is easy to learn,
it has a deep and interesting feature set.

Drag in sounds from Audio clips, the Browser or your file system. Map zones to the keyboard,
record directly to the sampler, and create slices using beat detection. Modify each sound layer with
trimming, looping, pitch, panning, reversing, filter, and comprehensive envelopes, and LFOs. You
can also choose one-shot triggering and trigger different samples based velocity. Also, you can load
SoundFont files by drag and drop.

Use the right side scratchpad to collect files that you need to edit, slice or just want to keep on hand
to use later

 
Tracktion has added a chord track that your MIDI generator tracks can now follow.  The chord track is also handy to have for reference if you are entering chords by hand on the editor or playing them in, as a reminder where the chord changes are.  The MIDI features now have a more 'finished' feel to them, where in the first version seemed a bit more of a work in progress.
 
I have used Waveform as a secondary DAW since it was first released last year.  Before the Cakewalk news.  I was sold on the MIDI creativity tools and chord support. 
 
I wasn't looking to replace Sonar, just for something to enhance musical creativity and songwriting.  It is really surprising what a full featured DAW program it is!  You could start and finish something in it if you really wanted to, but my plan was to use it as a MIDI sequencer, then export tracks back to my main DAW (which is looking more and more like Studio One these days).
 
I agree with the opinion that if you are going to have several DAWs, they should not all look and feel alike.  Take advantage of the differences, and enjoy what these differences can being to the creative process. 

There sure are plenty of choices. Tracktion Waveform, MixcraftPro 8, Presonus Studio One 3,
Steinberg Cubase 9.5, MOTU DP9.5, Magix Samplitude, Cockos Reaper, etc..........
Everyone's workflow is different. Everyone has to demo them and choose the one that fits. Or maybe it like
Harry Potter and the DAW chooses you :)
 
 
 

Reaper. Now completely. It is not perfect externally, but it is ideal in functional. Additionally, customization allowed me to "sculpt" Sonar from it, with a close workflow.
The latest news about the addition of ARA2 and the unofficial support of the CWP project files are very encouraging. I made the right choice.

It's been a real eye opener for me to have Reaper on one screen and Sonar on the other and go back and forth between them in the course of transferring a huge project across. 118 tracks and I'm now at the stage of doing the automation. I have to be brutally honest - so far, I haven't found one single thing that I prefer in Sonar. And with all of the tracks loaded up and their FX in place, they're like two different DAW's. When I move focus to Sonar, there's a good 2 second delay before it's responsive, and oftentimes when I hit play I will get the spinning mouse pointer followed by the audio engine shutting down. When I move focus over to Reaper, it's responsive immediately and plays without a hitch every time. Sonar is starting to feel very clunky in comparison. Maybe you only really notice these differences in large projects, but for me it's like night and day. 
 
My biggest fear about transferring this project was the automation. I have a lot of sound design going on via the automation of effects like delay, filters and reverbs, and many of the tracks have between 5-10 lanes of automation. Drawing automation envelopes in Sonar is really troublesome. There are bugs and annoyances galore. Lots of unexpected behavior and fiddliness. Even though I did a lot of it, I was never fully happy about doing it. In preparation for doing it in Reaper, I watched one online video and read a couple of forum posts to answer further questions, and now I'm breezing through it. I use a lot of curves and stepped automation in my projects and doing it in Reaper is such a breeze by comparison, once you've learned a couple of keyboard modifiers (and now I find that tool HUD in Sonar a PITA!) Here's a snatch of some of the automation I've been tearing through with Reaper, just one part of one track (as you can see I have my work cut out). It's been an absolute joy so far, and I could never say that about drawing automation in Sonar. 
 

 
I don't know, everything just seems so much more accurate and precise in Reaper. Things work exactly how I'd expect them to. I think part of Sonar's problem was that it was a frustrating uphill slog for new users because of the way it's designed. I also think automation looks a hell of a lot nicer in Reaper than it does in Sonar, and the whole business of managing multiple automation lanes is so much more logical and convenient. Even selecting the parameters for automation - no more trawling back and forth through endless scrolling menus with the cursor keys looking for one parameter out of hundreds. With Reaper you get a nice big window listing them all and you simply check the ones you want. I can select every parameter I want to automate in one go and it gives me the lanes. I can choose which ones to show or hide from this screen, and I can size them all independently of each other.
 

 
And no more accidentally hitting the automation lane button and having a "default" volume automation tied to my fader that I have to delete - god how many times do I do that in Sonar, just in the course of one session, lol. So yeah, Reaper isn't the most modern looking DAW by default, but by golly it's designed so well and it just works. I love it. Honestly I am blown away by this software and how much it cost me. 
 
 

And I think a lot of people that have spent quite some money lately on other DAWs (me included, with both Studio One 3 Professional and Cubase Pro 9.5 recently purchased) would be more than happy to return. The newly saved DAW missionaries exempted, of course.

sharke

emwhy
Learning Reaper requires a LOT of desire!

It really doesn't. After watching a few videos on YouTube I'm almost as fluent with it as I was in Sonar.

The hardest thing to learn with Reaper is that you do NOT have to perform step "A" before performing step "B", and perform both steps "A" and "B" before proceeding to step "C".
 
Reaper is not procedural and linear like Sonar. It's more like Object Oriented Programming where you can start at "C" if you want to, and either later or never do "A" and "B".  I didn't really get what "Tool-less" mouse interface meant until I had been using it for a while and then loaded up Sonar one day to access an older project.

How come nobody said they were going to try BandLab?

What DAW will I be using?
SONAR, duh!

azslow3
at the moment Sonar is one of the worse DAWs in terms of performance, stability and consistency.

Not sure what makes you say that. On my PC Sonar is the most stable and efficient DAW. I can finish a project from scratch within only a few hours in Sonar. For instance, this particular tune was ready in 3-4 hours, including writing, arranging, recording, mixing.
 

 
Takes a lot longer in other DAWs I also own and know fairly well.

SONAR!