Agreed with the last post. Certain DAWs are better for certain types of music and audio task so I think you can go from there and then use experience to guide you. eg.
- FL Studio - great for loop and sequence based music. Good for electronic instruments and genres. Poor for audio tracking and editing work, and virtually no score/notation capability at all.
- Sonar - good for tracked audio, ok with MIDI, passable for score and notation. Poor with sequences, ok with loops. No real direct audio manipulation capability.
- Reaper - good for tracked audio. passable with MIDI. No score or notation, no sequence support.
- Ableton Live - great for loops and sequences. No score, no notation. Poor audio tracking support.
Basically, it's just a case of looking at what is in GeneralQuery's list, and matching that to the specs of each DAW.
Personally I'm considering moving to Cubase as Sonar's limitations are causing me many problems, but it took me years of using Sonar to come up against the limitations. You always lose something with every move though - before I used Sonar I used to use tracker/sequencer programs like FastTracker and they have a workflow speed for certain types of music that most DAWs (except FL Studio, and maybe Ableton Live) can't match. For this reason, if your output has to be diverse then I think it always helps to be fluent with more than one DAW.
