On the latter count, you could also help them by letting folks know about (free) Cakewalk's many good points. Hip-Hop and EDM, iot's Ableton then Reason. If you want pristine sound SONAR is one of a handful that can deliver. For making music like you would with an MPC (loop based) Ableton has surpassed Reason and ACID, Adobe bought omne and made it boring, as did SONY, they bought ACID and then wouldn't let users use anything but samples from them. If you need to make very high quality recordings it is in the top 4 or 5. I think alot comes down to which program you feel comfortable with. When Roland bought it there was a bright light for SONAR, but they dropped the ball and released their matching hardware during SONAR8, Huge mistake. It has a learning curve and is a HUGE powerful suite of software. They had the first dockable windows in GUI and many more firsts. It is a sad story what happened to Cakewalk and SONAR, they have always been trend setters. It can be quite good but not great deopending on what your doing with it.

Presonus has made leaps and bouinds in quality, Steinberg is Quality, Reason is what it is.

They never went after the Apple crowd and Fruity Loops was always really cheap, as sounds cheap. You canuse SONAR alone to record, produce, edit, mix and release a top of the chart record that could win prozes for sound quality. It(SONAR) is a linear based recording platform that can do looping very well also, Ableton is a looping platform that is getting better at linear recording. Had Rolands release of matching hardware been done after the change to X1, Sonar may be much closer to the top than it is now, as fdar as sales etc goes. MOTU's digital performer has a good sound engine. Ableton Live has slowly gotten better, but still hasn't caught SONAR. Its native app doesn't sound as good as Sonar and is not a flexable or as powerful. It has arguably the best sounding sound engine of any DAW exceopt ones that use banks of outboard multithousand dollar processors such as AVID/Digidesign Pro tools. I am and have been a Sonar user for over 10 years.

Free cakewalk recording software