Allow me to amend my recommendations about software demos: Most of the software I’ve recommended here have demo versions. You can use them but, realistically, I have found it difficult to actually learn how to use complicated music software in the demo mode, especially hosts like Cubase and Sonar or specialty items like almost anything from Native Instruments. It took me over a year to feel really comfortable and proficient in FL Studio (Fruity Loops) so good luck getting to know these guys very well. And this was after using Cakewalk, ACID and others for almost 15 years. Ableton Live is taking me a few months to master but I cheated: I actually read the manual from back to front. It helped, you know, a little but in the end it just confirmed the axiom that reading manuals is still overrated.

Even you don’t have a prayer of being hyper-productive at a given program in 30 days or less (or in the case of Reason 20 minutes or less) sometimes you can get a gut feeling for what a host program will feel like from the demo. For example, I love the demo for Raw Material’s Tracktion. They have several cool and unique UI gestures that I understood right away and wish were in every program, so even though their project model is funky I could tell that if I ever bothered to learn how to use I could have serious fun and be productive time with it.

Now that I’ve basically talked you out of it, let me assure that it is imperative that you download demos of software before purchasing. You want to make absolutely sure it works with your hardward config because even if you have the latest, most generic setup with the newest Soundblaster with the newest drivers, XP Pro with latest patches, latest DirectX, etc. etc. there are no guarantees.

I also recommend you get a clear understanding of return policies from wherever you purchase the software from.

Until recently, I have rarely upgraded a major release of music software or switched programs completely without having to do something to my hardware configuration. Sometimes it’s “just” updating the drivers for my sound card, which can be treacherous enough. A few times it meant order new sounds cards. Sometimes it meant a whole new friggin computer. The big exceptions were the latest update of FL and Ableton’s Live both of which installed and “just worked” but then I had just purchased a new sound card system anyway, so it’s hard to say how it would have played out with my old system. I did a ton of System Restore Points anyway, all along the way.

A word about cracks: maybe software makers are getting more savvy, maybe the latest generation of crackers are lazy, but the latest round of cracks I’ve encounters (at other people’s houses of course) were pretty flaky. There were grayed out or missing menu items to pretty important features. Sometimes those features are not things you reach for right away, like, say the first month or two of using the program but they are missing. Sometimes the crack is for the demo version not the release version of the software (not necessarily the same code base with all the same DLLs). In one case the samples library (the files used as basic sound generators) were inaccessible so that has nothing to do with code. And I’ve said nothing about the cracks that just plain outright fuck up your system. Hell, you run a big enough risk with that running software you paid for, you’re playing Siberian roulette with a crack.