Reaper made the laudable business decision to give away their software, and it's served them well. Sonar and Cubase have always been good at marketing. ProTools has market share because ProTools has market share - it's the winner-take-all circular logic that governs the realm of software. To people who've delved into its abilities, Samplitude is often indispensable. To the prospective buyer, the question is probably: Why would I commit to a such a little-known, relatively expensive program? Well, considering the lack of marketing, the mere fact that Samplitude still exists is a testimony to its virtue. The people who created this software are passionate about what they're doing, and it shows. But I'll say this about Samplitude: if you're willing to invest in the learning curve, you'll find it can do just about anything you can think of. Perhaps if I spent as much time with Reaper I'd come to appreciate it as much.

Of course, I'm highly biased, because I logged the long hours learning how to use all this power. For me, it's like the Photoshop of DAWS – I can't imagine using anything else. I wanted to goose this thread to reiterate just how freaking powerful this program is. If you just bought a Porsche, upgrading from a Saturn, you'll basically need to learn to drive all over again.

But also like a German car, if you get past the quirkiness, Samp was a great machine to drive.The German sports car analogy is a good one. In a BMW SUV you push the tailgate button down to lift up the gate, just odd. Its a lot like driving a German car, nothing really seems to work the way it seems like it should, things were just never really intuitive. I used Samp for years (almost a decade now that I think about it).

Samplitude pro x3