That’s good to a point – you definitely don’t want to take on learning a new DAW when you’re trying to finish music or, worse, on a deadline. And unlike effects and instruments, which everyone tends to switch up regularly, DAWs have notoriously entrenched user bases. Pay that some note.īut education and community building aside, the free edition also means the chance to toy around with a different DAW and its ways of working. Tracktion’s patchable Rack is included even in the free version – which means it’s also a handy plug-in host, since it fully supports plug-ins in the freeĪlso, Tracktion’s free DAW also runs natively on Linux and is tested on 64-bit Ubuntu, making this a serious tool for lab installs on that OS.

(The other I’d recommend, one with industrial-strength features – and that’s also fully free and open source – is Ardour.) Nothing against Audacity, which is a servicable if not-terribly-modern wave editor, but I find it horrifying how many students have to suffer through using Audacity for DAW workflows.

There aren’t a lot of tools that are really usable in their free versions, which for teaching is a particular limitation. The big deal about Tracktion Waveform Free is that it’s really full-functioned, free (proprietary) software for Mac, Windows, and Linux.

Free cakewalk by bandlab pros vs cons