Not wanting to pay a hefty license fee led me away from Ableton and into the loving arms of Renoise. It has an unlimited free trial with no restrictions, but a full license is $80 per FULL POINT RELEASE. That is: if you pay at v3.2, you don't pay again until v4.2. I paid once in 2012 and still haven't paid again yet. So it's cheap. But it's also fully featured, and surprisingly powerful. It's got a scary UI and... Source: almost 2 years ago

If you're in to music creation, give it a go. http://renoise.com. Source: over 2 years ago

There's plenty of software available for PC so it's easy to try out if tracker workflow is your thing :P I think Renoise is the most popular and most powerful tracker and there's a free demo available in https://renoise.com. Source: over 2 years ago

My U-HE synths.. For a long time have I wondered what the big 'fuss' was all about, I've read & seen so many people talking highly about these. And then NI had a nice Holiday season sale. So now I too have Diva, Hive (and a bit more) then also grabbed Bazille shortly after. Yah, here's the next person sharing his admiration for U-HE :-). Source: 10 months ago

If you need sampled sounds of acoustic instruments Kontakt is the industry standard. Particularly to create soundtracks the likes of Berlin strings, Cinestrings, Cineperc, etc etc all run in Kontakt. V-Collection shines in modelling synth hardware. The advantage is that you can modify the parameters live and they are not (although they may be sometimes) effects applied directly onto sampled sounds. This collection... Source: over 1 year ago

This is true. I use Bitwig Studio which is native for Linux and has a bunch of great stuff built in. A couple of companies I've found that have great native Linux VST plugins are Audio Assault, these are also a very reasonable price, and u-he. Not to mention you can use SFZ instruments with Carla from KX Studio. But I've found that I prefer the raw samples and using Bitwig's own multisample file format. Linux... Source: over 2 years ago

The U-he https://u-he.com/ guy/owner Urs Heckmann is basically Han's personal engineer who collaborated with him for years. He designed the Dark Zebra for the Dark Knight and Dark Knight Rises for example. Source: over 2 years ago

Also, most of the big VST development companies release at least one product, or a entry version of their paid-for products, for free, most of the time you just need to sign up for an account with your email address. Some examples I use: Https://u-he.com/ Https://labs.spitfireaudio.com/. Source: over 2 years ago