[dottjt]

It's funny, because I went full Bitwig after being dissatisfied with the lack of certain workflow features in Ableton Live (for example, no customisable shortcuts, crappy bounce workflow etc.)

...and while I loved Bitwig, and while Bitwig is vastly superior on a technical and workflow level, I had this epiphany about music making: It should be about making music.

It's not about having shortcuts or having better ways of doing things. The problem is that I ended up spending more time customising Bitwig and playing around with all the cool things it could do, that it kind of took the focus away from actually making music.

Basically, I'm the kind of person that likes to tinker and that's a huge distraction for me. I think what makes Ableton Live so valuable to me, is that there is no tinker.

It's the fact that it is so bare-bones in a lot of ways, that makes it work for me and allows me to focus on making music.

[NickC25]

That's one of the reasons I think FL is a great DAW, because there's no session mode, only an arrangement mode. You're forced to compose rather than loop endlessly or muck about tweaking parameters.

I think Live is geared to "do whatever you want, quickly" as opposed to Bitwig being "make any sort of noise you can imagine" or FL "write whatever you want, quickly".

All great tools, just depends on what you'd like to do, honestly. Nothing is inherently bad.

[dottjt]

I had the opposite experience with FL Studio.

I think the problem is that there's too many different ways to do the same thing in FL Studio, whereas Ableton Live keeps it pretty simple in terms of workflow.

There's no session mode, but you get that sequencer instead. But to be fair, I never used session mode in Ableton, only arrangement.

But at the end of the day, DAWs are so personal. Everyone has a different preference for something different.