is reason a professional program?

[L. A. Stone]

Protools would be perfect because i got an mbox, thats what im using to record so it would be perfect for that to be my main program to use along side reason...but i hate the way stuff is bounced from protools (it plays the whole file taking quite a long time) and i can't find a way to bounce whole songs in one sitting. Meaning It literally take me over an hour to track out beats when sold.

Exactly. We Cubase users have been begging Steinberg to wake up to this one and realize that there's more to making music than just making music. Somebody actually wrote some kind of macro program that allowed SX2 to do what you're asking about, but it didn't work on SX3 last time I checked.

Cubase-Just don't care for the layout. The mixer has these bus channels as well as the normal channels which confuse me and the visual representation of the audio is very small making sampling and cutting difficult. Oh the one i got is the Cubase Le one so it's probably different with the higher end ones.

This much is definately a matter of knowing how to get the most out of a Cubase. Any of the types of channels in Cubase's mixer, and any channel you please can be hidden. On the left of the mixer is a bunch of icons which hide or expose channels by types. Rewire, audio, midi, etc. But also you can simply hide a channel at will. The "visual" of the audio is a matter of zoom level. You have all kinds of control of something as simple as this. There's a command that lets Cubase zoom into whatever you have selected so that your selection covers the whole arranger view. With a single command. Then you can hit another single command that will take you back out to the overall view of the project, or any other view that you can setup as a window set. It's very serious. For example, I like to push the transport nearly off the top right of my screen because I don't like having a transport floating over my work when I 'm making music. I have a window set that puts the transport exactly there, also zooms the arranger window to precisely where I like to see it and any other window falls into place. I have another command for the mixer view which also has specific details of what I like to see and where. Unfortunately, Cubase LE is not worth giving away. Cubase SX handles audio better than anything else. I can drop 15 full length audio tracks into Cubase at the same time, there's no load time. Press play immediately and hear them play back immediately before even the waveforms have been drawn. There's a serious wave editor built in as well. Essentially, Cubase has almost everything. Timestretching and pitch shifting are supported directly in the audio tracks now.

I personally never like Pro Tools. I don't know how good it is now, but a few years ago, it couldn't hold a candle to Cubase in regards to dealing with midi or even audio. Unfortunately, Cubase isn't up to speed on the simultaneous exporting of separate audio tracks. It's bizarre that FL Studio has this implemented to perfection. You could track out a 30 track song in about 3 minutes and FL throws in the mixdown just for the heck of it. LOL. All the tracks retain the name that you named them in the program so you don't have to rename them later. Very good. Other programs that do this are Sonar which is also very good at this and Tracktion, that I know of. Probably a few others too.