Reaper reaper.fm

By far the best digital audio workstation and just one of the best pieces of consumer software available in general. Written by Justin Frankel, creator of winamp, reaper is powerful, extensible, and efficient.

Reaper allows for exteme customization to suit any music or audio production workflow. It includes lua bindings for extensibility and a custom audio plugin / dsp scripting language called JSFX. (Shame that it has "JS" in the name.)

Reaper is very resource efficient, starts up fast, and runs on mac, windows, and linux. (I have used reaper on a raspberry pi as a backup recorder for live shows.) The total download for reaper is 12mb and it can run without install. This means you can download and start reaper faster than you can start most daws that are already installed. And when it opens you will have way more functionality.

Reapers financial model is "This is not a free product but we'll give it to you for free, indefinitely." Reaper charges less than $100 for non-commecrial use, and is a lifetime license. Reaper enforces no limit on how many devices you can activate with a license.

Other than Justin Frankel, Reaper is maintained by only one other person. Frankel has expressed in interviews that his goals are to keep making good software. For this reason, I trust Reaper and think it's worth investing the time to learn. I expect it to be my go-to DAW for at least another decade, hopefully longer.

Cool Features

Simple batch audio converting

Templates and wildcards for all created audio files - this means any audio I record can be something like "$date-$trackname-$takename" and any audio I export can be something like "$projname-$datename-EDIT1". There are a ton more useful wildcards, these are just examples.

Ability to customize every menu bar and many other aspects of the UI. Some people have used this to make Reaper look and function like other DAWs. This is similar to how Linux distro maintainers tend to just recreate Windows over and over.