A fairly new DAW on the market for Windows is REAPER. REAPER plays in the same category as ProTools and Ableton, but it doesn't require specific audio hardware (like ProTools), and you can download a non-crippled, non-time limited version. The only difference you see as an unregistered user is a 5 second nag screen when you load it. To register, it's $50 for a non-commercial license, and $225 for a commercial license. There's no "spyware" aspect; it's all based on the honor system. Price definitely played into my first experimentation with REAPER, and after I started ripping into their sample project, I was hooked.
What is it, exactly? To quote their site: "REAPER is a fully featured multitrack audio and MIDI recording, editing, processing, mixing, and mastering environment."
REAPER is built on a solid end-to-end 64 bit audio engine, so you don't have to worry about quality degradation. It allows unlimited Audio tracks (recorded audio) and unlimited MIDI tracks. REAPER allows you to use DX, DXi, VST, VSTi, and JS plugins, so you can use (nearly) all virtual instruments and virtual effects you come across. Here's the nice part: once a piece has been laid down in whatever fashion (recorded audio, external MIDI, soft-synth MIDI, etc), then all pieces are treated equally. You can dump additional effects or effects sends on any track and they still function the same.
REAPER supports a wide range of control surfaces and external interfaces, so you can integrate whatever hard gear you have directly into REAPER. At this point, I regularly use an M-Audio KeyStudio 25, guitar via Lightsnake interface, and a microphone all jacked in simultaneously to REAPER, and I haven't had any problems. REAPER does support "MIDI LEARN", so within your project you can individually map pretty much any controls to your external control surfaces. I map the knobs on my KeyStudio to whatever VSTs I'm working with, so I can "knob twiddle" without having to control them with the mouse. Yes, it's a common feature on a pro-grade DAW, but it is nice to know you can get the same level of interaction when you're using cheap hardware.
This is such a big program, it's impossible to go into all the features that make it "pop" for the user. It has piano rolls, extensive routing controller - you can have unlimited parallel sends and up to 64 UNIQUE send paths, normalizing and quantizing individual elements, recording automation to capture pretty much any "knob twiddling" and parameter changes you need (recordable realtime or simply by moving lines to represent the values), a great pack of 64-bit VSTs and JS plugins to start your collection, and a lot more. Can you tell I'm loving this program? One of the other significant targets of the development of REAPER is to make sure the commonly used features are not buried too deeply in the UI. Most of the features you will commonly use are either available from the UI itself or from a simple right-click popup menu.
I only have one real gripe about using REAPER, but it is a common problem across pretty much all DAWs: some plugins are highly unstable and can crash the entire project. (I use mostly VSTs, so I can only speak to that) Most of what I use are freeware plugins, so they haven't gone through as rigorous testing as "professional" plugins, but even there you occasionally find one that doesn't work with a specific DAW. The unfortunate side of this is that I usually only discover a VST to be bombing out on me when I go to save the project. Then you're left with a trial-and-error to see what plugin crashed it out. So long as you do some testing with any new plugins before you commit trying to build seriously, you'll be fine.
The team at Cockos who is developing this DAW definitely stands behind their product, with new updates sometimes weeks apart as they respond to the user community and roll out new features and enhancements. There's also a great user community who does a good job of helping you keep on your feet.
I'm sure I'll have more to say about REAPER in the future, but you should consider checking it out.
The homepage is at: http://www.reaper.fm/
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