ProTools gives you the advantage of easy interfacing with the pro studio world since it's more or less the standard. If you work on your own, recording one instrument at a time, you probably don't need a lot of inputs & outputs.Ĭertain interfaces will throw in a "lite" version of their DAW software which will save you the cost of buying any of the Mac heavy hitters like MOTU's Digital Performer, Apple Logic, or Avid ProTools – which are in the hundreds of dollars. There's a ton of interfaces from various manufacturers starting at less than $100 for 2-in/2-out, going up to >$1000 for interfaces that have enough inputs to record a full band in one pass. The choice of interface boils down to how many simultaneous input channels you need, and how many of them need to be mic-level vs line or instrument level. You'll likely need an interface to get audio into your Mac. Stepping from the 1980s into the 2020s? Can you say "paradigm change", lol. A lot of the available DAWs, both cheap and expensive, have their own strengths, weaknesses, and areas of focuses, but these days, more and more, it seems like it really comes down to personal preference, as there's enough overlap in features that you can't really go wrong. Ableton seems more geared toward looping and live performance, and I've had frustrating experiences with it, but I know folks who love it to death.
Those are the ones I have the most experience with.
The nice thing about Logic is that it comes with a lot of house plugins and software instruments that are perfectly usable.Īudacity is also a very popular open-source, free DAW - it doesn't have the built-in plugins and softsynths like Garageband, but it's not as limited as far as recording quality.
If you're on a Mac, you could start for free with Garageband, and move on up to Logic pretty easily when you want to invest the few hundred bucks - at this point Garageband is basically the simplified, trial version of Logic.