REAPER

Justin Frankel left AOL after the Nullsoft years and founded Cockos, which shipped REAPER 1.0 in 2006. The name stands for Rapid Environment for Audio Production, Engineering, and Recording. A licence costs around 60 dollars for individuals and small businesses, and the 60-day free evaluation never technically ends — the program just keeps nagging. The installer weighs a few tens of megabytes and launches in seconds.

Where other DAWs have fixed track types, every REAPER track is the same, and nearly everything can be scripted through ReaScript in Lua, EEL2 or Python. That has made it a favourite among game and podcast audio people, and with anyone who would rather rebuild their workflow than learn someone else's. Plugins in VST, CLAP and LV2 formats are supported.