The question of which multitrack software to settle with on the long run is almost as important as choosing the right, near zero latency sound card that is reliable, works for you and will serve well in most of your projects. The easy answer to this question is to go with multiple software on your computer and have the chance to change between these for each of your projects.
However, I am quite sure, there are high number of wanna-be audio engineers like me around the world, who are not that loose on the budget and cannot afford having multiple multitrack software running on their portable studios = in most cases this would be their laptop. Also, having multiple, different systems on the same computer might cause stability issues. Most people stick to their favourite recording environment for most of the time, even if they have access to multiple resources.
Once you have made up your mind and are going for a software based multi-track recording solution, there are quite a high number of good options available that can be grouped the easiest by the operating system they support. At the time of writing this article, the following software can be considered as reliable, Mac or PC based multitrack recording solutions:
| Software | Available | price | link |
| Ableton live | Mac, PC | 349 EUR | link |
| Ableton suite | Mac, PC | 549 EUR | link |
| Audacity | Mac, PC | free | link |
| Studio One | Mac | 310 EUR | link |
| Reaper | Mac, PC | 30 EUR | link |
| Logic studio | Mac | 366 EUR | link |
| Ntrack | Mac, PC | 64 EUR | link |
| Adobe audition | Pc (Mac) | 256 | link |
| Sonar Cakewalk | Mac, PC | 36 – 150 EUR | link |
| Garage band | Mac | 15 EUR | link |
| Cubase | Mac, PC | 610 EUR | link |
Please note that this article will not give you any comparison of these software, in many cases it would be at lest unfair, if not impossible, to compare certain elements of this list. A very good example would be comparing Audacity with Cubase.
Luckily, there are quite a few options available at the cheap end of the list, but we all known that buying something cheap can eventually end up being very expensive. Limited functionalities, missing effects / plugins might force the user to upgrade to a more expensive and feature rich software shortly after the purchase. Similarly, you may realise very fast that the stability of some budget software still leave much to be desired. Serious, regular work cannot be planned on something unreliable.
There is the other end of the road of course, and you might end up getting lost in the thousand different options / chaotic interface of Logic Pro, and eventually realise that you should have gone for something a lot simpler, like Garage Band or Reaper. Your productivity level could seriously affected negatively, if you have to spend hours in finding your way around.
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