Yes I also suggest Ardour over other DAWs. :-]

I use reaper day in and day out for sound design and composition. It truly is more customizable and powerful than any other DAW in a few ways. That being said, Studio One smokes reaper in its weakest area…midi (e.g piano roll, expression maps , etc)

I still recommend Reaper because it’s so accessible and powerful. Just hope Cockos invest in midi feature like Cubase and Studio One have.

Reaper is indeed amazing. For electronic music and sound design, I'd say studio one has some advantages though. The absolute champion for that is Bitwig, which also works on linux and seems to be very underrated in general!

Probably unpopular, but I really like Studio One. Reaper is more powerful, and I love it too, but there's something about Studio One that just let me wrap my brain around it the first time I used it. For me, it's great for quick and dirty production which is a lot of what I do and "just works" with my interface and mixing console.

Of course that's not the case for everyone and a lot of folks want and need something with more to it.

I just want to know how to add free virtual instruments in Reaper. Also, I have a bug that persisted over Linux installations where when taking MIDI input from my musical keyboard, Reaper would detect the first note I played, but it wouldn't detect that I stopped playing it, and it wouldn't detect any new notes until like 10 seconds later. I have a MIDI cable plugged directly into a USB port of my computer, so if you could help that would be appreciated.