A quick rant: I love Reaper.

If you’re unfamiliar, Reaper is complete multi-track audio and MIDI recording, editing, processing, mixing, and mastering environment. There’s too much going on in Reaper to put it all here. Suffice to say: if Pro Tools can do it, so can Reaper. This is full-blown professional-quality recording solution.

But you haven’t heard the best part. While Pro Tools will set you back about $700 to get up and running, Reaper is yours for just $60 (for home users). Even better, you can trial it, in full, for free forever (with just a 5 second nag screen at the beginning).

It’s a tiny download, stable as hell, comes loaded with a bunch of VSTs and VSTIs and is, quite simply, awesome.

PROS: The best DAW you can get for the price, period.

CONS: Reaper is the absolute balls. Try it.
DOWNLOAD: http://www.reaper.fm/download.php