Cakewalk is totally free, has decent to good stock plugins, some virtual instruments and has a 'classic' approach that will translate well to Cubase, Logic, Reaper, Pro Tools, Studio One, but also give you a great foundation to get familiar with DAWs that do (to some degree) things differently, like Ableton, FL, Bitwig etc.

Meanwhile, get the hang of general concepts with something free or more affordable. I realize it requires a certain time investment to try out various DAWs but I'd really advise it before you invest. So if (for example) you use an older 32 bit only version of SoundForge, it's not going to work with Melodyne any more.

I love it for a lot of other things it does (MIDI related stuff, flexible playlist for arranging freely and creatively etc) but in that department, it's infuriatingly clunky and tedious. Your Melodyne 4 installation AND your Melodyne 4 licenses will be removed - and actually, your v4 licenses become invalid at the point you purchase your upgrade Melodyne 5 is 64 bit only. If you're doing a lot of analog tracking (miced-up instruments etc recorded as audio), FL Studio is a pain due to the cumbersome way it deals with audio routing. Any of the usual names you'll come across in the DAW space will get the job done but they each hit a sweet spot or have features that are more convenient for certain workflows/genres and less so for others.įor example, you mention wanting to record multiple external instruments.

Melodyne bandlab