Reaper
Reaper is a very flexible, lightweight, and cheap DAW, made by Cockos.
While it's not free software, it does come across as made by and for hackers. The kind of people who like free software praise its absurd levels of functionality and customisability; the kind of people who don't like free software complain about its complexity and unintuitive user interface.
Personally, I think it's just about the best way I've yet discovered to output MIDI and record audio. My main workflow these days is to compose music in Reason, export the notation as a Standard MIDI File, and import it into Reaper to use as a software multitrack recorder and mixing desk.
I especially like its ability to explode notes by pitch. I've set it up to do this with a single keystroke, which I routinely use to solo and record drums one at a time, after composing them together. On a technical level, its plain text file format also plays very nicely with Git.
Aside from the DAW itself, I also recommend its included plug-ins ReaTune (a simple tuner) and ReaEQ (which, in Waves terms, is like Q10 overlaid on top of PAZ — perfect for surgically notching out troublesome whining from the A-188-1's clock).
Further reading
Reviews
Reaper V1
- "Cockos Reaper DAW" Martin Walker, Sound On Sound, Jun 2007
Reaper V2.4
- "Cockos Reaper 2.4" Martin Walker, Sound On Sound, Jan 2009
Reaper V3
- "Cockos Reaper 3" Mike Senior, Sound On Sound, Aug 2009
Reaper V4
- "Cockos Reaper 4" Mike Senior, Sound On Sound, Oct 2011
DAWs: Reaper
