best daw for free/beginners

[vale bone]

hi i just wanted to know what is the best daw that ppl would reccomend for free/beginners!
ik abt garageband, bandlab, reaper, flstudio21 etc. i would love to hear the experiences from other ppl as well as other reccomendations!! ty :)

[tender plaza]

GarageBand is solid and can record well, slimmed down version of Logic Pro which can be bought for 200 usd. Probably the best bang for your buck on the market

[humble heron]

cakewalk is a free one which is also quite nice

[high scroll]

Reaper is 60 and the trial is infinite and fully featured so you can not pay for it and be totally fine

I use reaper so I might be biased towards it. It has a bit of a learning curve and the defaults are a bit questionable (you can change everything in reaper) the interface works but the default skin is a bit stupid looking but you can download extra themes for it and make it look nice AND more legible

what I would say is, I used flstudio, sonar (now cakewalk), protools, studio one and cubase. once I set reaper to fit my needs and workflow I saw no point on using anything else since I'm 10 times faster in it

logic seems like a good option, everything seems to make sense, garageband is a bit stripped back for my taste, flstudio works but its a bit weird in a few aspects

[humble heron]

agreed with reaper!! its actually my main one but i wanted to give another rec lol

[high scroll]

studio one is good but not free xd

[humble heron]

i only have the one that came with my interface LOL i should try it sometime

[tender plaza]

Main reason one bothers with pro tools is they work in a commercial studio or want to do music for a living

[high scroll]

you can just do stems and raw tracks. it works in every daw

[tender plaza]

It’s moreso that the commercial places mainly use pro tools, even the run down spots near me all require engineers to know pro tools to work there. Is what it is 🤷‍♂️

[high scroll]

I know my way around protools, I just never use it cuz I can chuck my daw in a pendrive and take it with me

[humble heron]

yeah i hate pro tools with a passion LOL

its a shame its the industry standard

[tender plaza]

I highly recommend ableton! Super new user friendly. (And I agree with the rest of y’all pro tools is fucking painful)

[echo sand]

Bro learn reaper

reaper is awesome

Reaper is super userfriendly

[topaz wadi]

Go with reaper. It is industry standard for literally 60 usd

[high scroll]

I sure see reaper more and more on studios

[tender plaza]

And you can even skin it like pro tools so people are none the wiser