soens
Here's the biggy for me: Since it lacks Elements there is no way to load your own samples or .sfz files rendering it almost useless for my needs except when I need stock samples.
Rapture Session is a playback engine only, it's definitely not for programmers. The advantage is that if people want to use the
stellar Gibson Bass Expansion pack
(or my upcoming Syntronic pack), they won't need to buy the full version of Rapture Pro.
I've had an interesting relationship with Rapture Pro. I absolutely loved Rapture; while everyone else was going Z3TA+, I was enraptured by Rapture. I was totally excited when Rapture Pro came out, but
totally disappointed when I started using it - it had so many bugs and loose ends I found it unusable (as did most people, I wasn't alone).
Eventually CW started fixing it, and I realized the incredible power in the Instruments page and the Vector Mixer was something i wouldn't get out of Rapture. So now I use Rapture Pro.
It's still a pig to program. This doesn't affect people who just want to play back sounds and do tweaks, but when you're creating an expansion pack with 100+ presets from the ground up, there are a lot of ways the process could be streamlined - for example, being able to copy and paste the mod matrix settings, or at least tear it off like you could in Rapture.
But overall, while it remains quirky in some ways (thankfully, not in terms of stability - it's been stable now for quite some time), Rapture Pro is unique and can make sounds no other soft synth can. The transposition engine is also exceptional, and there are some more fixes coming up this month that improve it just that much more. Some people think Rapture Pro was a mistake and Cakewalk should just can it, but I disagree 1000%. I
would have agreed with that sentiment early on, but with the slowly-but-surely improvements, these days it's an essential part of
all the music that I make. I can't think of anything I've done in the past year that hasn't had at least a couple instances.