Music Creation using Reason 4, ProTools... Looking Wistfully at Cubase-5
Pretty much all of my free time is spent playing with Reason and Protools.  Tonight I investigated Cubase-5 and Albeton Live as a comparison, because I'm feeling really confined in ProTools.  Tonight I did an exceptional amount of research on the alternatives.  My main focus is MIDI music production, though Cubase I think can hold its own on ProTools as well.

Reason 4 is excellent for MIDI music production, beats and loops.  It gives you a virtual rack and you plug your cables from output to input between them and create your sounds, mix things up, split out your drum machines into channels, whatever you please.  Reason 4's power is literally in the simplicity of its interface.  It is great for creation of MIDI music and the best sequencer feature is the ability to keep adding "note lanes" to each of your instrument track so you can test things out, split things out, merge or whatever.

The things I like about Pro-Tools are the instruments, mixer, post-production effects (like EQ, reverb, chorus, flangers, etc.), elastic time and a ton of other features that I see are useful for sequencing and production.  It is industry standard, powerful and pumps out some high quality sound.  It is great for post production and manipulation of audio streams.

On the other hand, ProTools is a music creator's nightmare.  First of all, you are charged for everything that other packages include right away, you are hardware dependent, and licensing of modules is all via this iLok crap.  ProTools 8 is awesome in terms of new features and it will entice a lot of people who work on electronic music, but the cost of the additional plugins will run your finances into the ground.  It's limited to a low 64 tracks (with an expansion pack), isn't 64 bit (like Cubase-5, which supports Vista 64), and has the worst workflow and interface for moving freely around different instruments and tracks while you're trying to stay in the creative flow.  RTAS support only - no native VST support!  Speaking of their (fantastic) instruments, THREE leading members of the A.I.R. team left in the last month and went to Apple (Live Pro, anyone?), including the CTO.  Oops.  That doesn't bode well for the future of MIDI at Digidesign.

Cubase 5 looks incredible.  It's powerful, and the vocal and wave editing is just as easy as moving MIDI around.  The instruments are innovative. The interface is really clean. You can get 64 bit for Vista64 and address a crap load of RAM.  The vocal tweaking interface is just ingenious and allows you to move voice around like it were MIDI, right down to the tiniest little sonic variant within the sound.  Instead of needing an app like Melodyne, they have pitch correction plug-in built in right off the bat.  It handles VST off the bat.  I can go on and on, but it's refreshing.

Albeton Live is completely another beast.  It is structured in a way that you can drop any loop sample of any tempo into a "slot" and it will start playing it on the next downbeat, in time.  It's a different concept.  Albeton Live encourages you to just write up music as it comes to you, then later on combine it or see how it is best arranged. It is really oriented towards those techno/house guys who do things live in the clubs, but for creative flow it gets away from the "tape deck" approach.

Ultimately, since I own PT 8, which still has a lot of advantages for getting a good sound, I'll stick with it for the post-processing and some of its great MIDI instruments. It's still excellent for the final mix downs and tracking once you've got your arrangement.  Reason is great for synthesized loops and sounds and simplified creative flow, and PT will still be good for combining all that stuff.  But if I were to drop some cash again, I would go straight to Cubase-5 and leave PT behind.  Industry standard, maybe, but it limits creative flow.  PC interfaces should be innovative and creative, not stagnant mimicking old ways of recording music.  Creativity isn't a linear process and UI designers need to keep pushing forward.