Historical
It all started in the early 1990s (1993 or 1994)
I started with a copy of Master Tracks Pro loaned to me by my mentor, along with a little Mac Plus and a simple 1 x 3 MIDI interface to use with it. This was my introduction to the wonder of MIDI sequencing. Basically, for the first time I could compose and record pieces of music with more than one simultaneous line (e.g., a piece with piano, bass and drums) by myself.
Pretty soon I realized I would need a little more juice both in the hardware and software realm. I looked at a number of software packages for the Macintosh (at this time music software for the PC was mostly pretty primitive.)
An important requirement was that it handle SysEx messages to and from my synthesizers.
Opcode Vision is the piece of software I am fondest of in the 10 years I've been doing music. It was obviously a labor of love from real old school propellerheads who knew the way a MIDI editing and sequencing program should work....with the addition of the Galaxy patch librarian it was a great system to write MIDI with.
After I abandoned the Mac (actually: Apple abandoned me by going to OS X and orphaning thousands of dollars worth of software) I cast around for something as good as Vision for the Windows platform. I frankly didn't find anything. I tried the Cubase and Logic demos and it was depressing since they were such skanky looking programs and unspeakably cumbersome.
Around that time Cakewalk reworked their sequencing program and renamed it as Sonar. Sonar is not perfect but is a really solid and usable program. I used version 4 a long time, and when version 5 was announced (back in 2005 or 2006?) I wasn't that excited about it. They also specified that it required Win XP to run which I figured would shut it off completely from me. But it turned out Sonar 5 did have some very desirable new features, and on a forum somewhere somebody said that it ran fine on Windows 2000. Thanks to great support from Cakewalk I was able to upgrade and I'm very glad I did--it's even more enjoyable to work in Sonar than it ever has been for me. (And most of the new effects and instruments bundled with Sonar 5 are excellent.)
There were some music programs that ran on the Mac that were not available for PCs. Besides Vision, I missed Max (originally from Opcode, now sold by Cycling '74). Eventually, mirabile dictu, C '74 did release a port of Max for the PC. Unfortunately they have left support for Windows 2000 behind which means I'm stuck at Max/MSP 4.3 until I upgrade my PC -- which I'm not about to soon.
I didn't miss the audio editing programs for the Mac; Windows has very good ones and as a matter of fact, there are some superb free ones: like GoldWave and Audacity. But I settled on Sound Forge which has pretty much all the features I want.
Actually one of the additional reasons I abandoned the Mac was that I was getting excited about Ableton Live (which I mention in many other places on this site) and realized the best way to get the most bang for buck out of it would be to move to a PC.
Although I'm pretty cynical about new releases from most software, Live 6 is really an excellent upgrade with really worthwhile new features, and the best part is it still is fully supported under Windows 2000.
