Tapsa Kuusniemi

This has been on my playlist of late:

This is actually very good information. Would be fantastic to see screenshots of the graphics. BTW, Absynth looks like like crap on anything... Great synth, horrible GUI.

Yeah, the trade off with the other guitars is that they're not Kontakt Player licensed, hence the lower price. Renegade is very capable and I use it very often.

They are only tools in the same sense that the hammer or the nailgun as neither of these will make you a better crafter. They just make the job different from the other. A carpenters skill is the thing that matters not the tool. Sure learning the tool will make things easier or smoother or faster but if you're a bad carpenter then whether you use a nailgun or a hammer doesn't really matter. Also why I prefer to call them tools is simply this: you rarely attach emotion to tools. And DAWs tend to get people's emotions riled up. In the end you can use any DAW to create fantastic things. Hell there are still people using such advanced things as a pen and sheet paper to create music (those troglodytes, sheesh). There have been a good number of assesments in this thread about good and bad things in different DAWs and that is great. Again, these make very little difference to me. In the end a compressor is a compressor and if you don't know how to use one it doesn't really matter which one you use. And if you know how to use one then it makes very little difference what you use. Most of the plugins that are unique are not stock plugins (for the exception of Logic's Alchemy) and these you need to acquire separately. The ProChannel is native and unique to Sonar/CbB but alot of those plugins are available as VST as well. Personally I've never quite liked the ProChannel, but that is my personal preference. What's different about most DAWs is the usability and that is a matter of personal preference. Again I can not understand how people think ProTools is in anyway a usable software but that only means that is does not suite me. It doesn't make it worse or better. But those are personal preferences. Sort of like do you prefer a yellow or a black hammer. It makes you feel better but it does not make you better, you just prefer the yellow hammer. It's still the same tool. What the GUI looks like is just a coat of paint on the cover. You're still dealing with the same things underneath. I'm not saying this doesn't matter, of course it does. I still loathe how Ableton looks like with it's grey minimalist washout look. But some like it. I've heard people loathe Sonar/CbB for how it looks and avoid it because of that. It still doesn't mean that their preferred tool is better when the music is out. What the music sounds like is and should be a reflection of your skill as an artist and not your skill at using a computer program. And that's why DAWs are tools.

Orange Tree Samples stuff is worth every buck. There's quite nothing like them. But if they are too expensive for you then maybe check out some of Indiginus's guitars, especially Renegade: http://indiginus.com/renegade.html Ilya Efimov has some great sounding guitars as well: http://www.ilyaefimov.com/products/electric-guitars.html But those are not match for Orange Tree.

What I always say is that the tools don't really matter, only what you do with them. I mean if the music is good who cares what it is made with. And if it's shit, then who cares about it.

Is there anywhere an actual list of instruments included?

I'm going to toot up Audio Damage's Quanta. Sure granular synthesis is not a new thing by now means, but what Quanta brings to the table is a million times more musical than anythin before it. It changed the way I saw granular things and made me try out new things on other granular plugins as well. There is something very casual about how Quanta treats granularity giving it an ease that is not present in other granular devices.

I use Studio One 4 for making music and Bitwig for sound design work. Sadly I was compelled to leave Sonar on a backburner with the Gibson debacle as I could not rely my professional work on a software that may not work on a new computer.

Much of what you say here falls under personal preference. There are alot of people who say the same about the GUI of Sonar/CbB and I say about Ableton and ProTools. But those are my personal preferences and do not reflect on the software. Bitwig does not work for you, but saying that there is nothing good without knowledge of the software is rather, well, dumb. There's a ton of stuff that Sonar/CbB does worse than Bitwig. There's also stuff that Sonar/CbB does better. As for intuitiveness, that's usually a case of learning how something works. Like I said Bitwig is though up differently and if you were to jump from Bitwig to Sonar/CbB then the latter would feel very cluncky and unintuitive. But both DAWs have their merits and strong points. Just as Cubase is different and has it's strong point. And just like Reaper, Studio One, Logic, Ableton, ProTools, Samplitude, Tracktion, FL Studio...

I'll add my assesments to this thread. After the Gibson debacle I went for Studio One and Bitwig. Previously already had Reaper but that one is too much for the tweakers to suit me (basically you can turn it into anything you want, if you have time, patience and some coding skills). STUDIO ONE 3 and 4: The workflow is intuitive and the Scratchpad is one of the most brilliant features. The Browser is miles ahead of CbB as is setting up multiout instrument tracks. MIDI editing is more basic than in CbB but fairly intuitive as well. ARA functionalities are probably the best on the market (kicking up Melodyne on a track is quite an experience compared to Sonar/CbB but hey Presonus is sitting on the tech). Video functionalities are fariyl basic, but better thatn Sonar / CbB. Coming from CbB there was a learning curve as to the GUI but it wasn't too much. BITWIG: Bitwig isn't for everyone. It is a pretty much completely differently though DAW from the rest. It takes quite a bit of time to get to know ins and outs coming from Sonar/CbB but once you get a grasp of the software then it is quite intuitive. Bitwig is not for heavy MIDI projects, those it can not handle like CbB, Studio One or any of the other major players. VST Sandboxing is probably one of the best things. You can crash a plugin and it just crashes the plugin only to be able to reload it with one click. A superb function. But the real thing with Bitwig is the modulation system. You can assign modulators to everything. And that is why I think Bitwig has a serious future for sound design work.

Was worried about the CA-2A myself as to me it beats out the competition (UAD atleast) hands down. Hopefully it will keep developing as a VST plugin and not as a CbB exclusive plugin.