Cakewalk Rapture
Very well specified. UI looks very nice but some of it's a bit fiddly and there's a lot of window switching to get to all the parts. That said, fairly easy to program. Sounds very good, more on the digital side of things. Lots of nice raw waves to sound design from, including a bunch of z3ta+ waves. Tons of presets included. Support and community are pretty solid. Licence *not* transferable.
Beware of Cakewalk. They have too many products & only 1 development team. I remember when I was using Project5. It had issues but they were more concerned with putting out a new version of Sonar than fixing Project5. That's when I found Live version 2. About a year + later, they had an upgrade (which you had to pay for) that fixed the issues. No small updates like Live. I say stay away.
Another Cakewalk opinion
I don't know about that. Project 5 v2 was badly needed, but was stable and added vital features. The Dimension Pro synth is excellent, reasonably priced, super stable for its power, and comes with multi-gigs of patches and multisamples. Sonar has proved to be stable and pretty well specified.
Believe it or not, the Cakewalk Synthesizers book really gave me an appreciation for their synth line, particularly those due to Rene Ceballos (sp?) -- Dimension, Rapture, sfz, etc.
PLUS one of my biggest issues: as far as I know, none of their products (at least up until last year or so when I bought the last) require authorization or net access for installation; you can install them on any system if you have the license code. That really simplifies things for me; as I hate dongles with a passion and find authorization a bit of a pain. In fact part of the resistance of me first getting Live was that system, but Live is such a crucial app I would probably even use a dongle if they went to that (please God no!)
r.
Believe it or not, the Cakewalk Synthesizers book really gave me an appreciation for their synth line, particularly those due to Rene Ceballos (sp?) -- Dimension, Rapture, sfz, etc.
PLUS one of my biggest issues: as far as I know, none of their products (at least up until last year or so when I bought the last) require authorization or net access for installation; you can install them on any system if you have the license code. That really simplifies things for me; as I hate dongles with a passion and find authorization a bit of a pain. In fact part of the resistance of me first getting Live was that system, but Live is such a crucial app I would probably even use a dongle if they went to that (please God no!)
r.