What is the best DAW for mixing a song?
Nothing beats Cubase, nothing.
Jokes aside, some DAWs have serious draw backs like faulty plugin latency compensation and automation (Logic) or reduced routing possibilities (FL).
Various DAW software have been designed to support the creation of various types of qualities. For instance most DAWs don't support sample rates above 192 kHz, but some do. In combination with 256 times oversampling such a sample rate feature in a DAW software alone can make a substantial quality difference to your work (given of course that you have an audio interface that supports 384 kHz sample rate) and hence yes you can say a particular DAW software was part of creating that.
And to your point, as much as I love FL studio, there are PDC issues with its routing. There are work arounds, but things get really messy when you try to do group parallel processing without it being a submix, Andrew scheps style. And sometimes the makeshift sends can actually be AHEAD of what you are sending to them.
24bit vs 16bit, the myth exploded!
To summarize, there is no real advantage to 192 khz over 44.1 khz in terms of audio quality other than one specific technical reason, which I'll mention in a second.
Samples in audio are not like "frames" in film, they are sinc functions (Google Lavry sampling theory). They are more than just a single instantaneous point in time. When you have a sample rate that is double the frequency range you want to represent, you get a perfect sampling of the waveform. That doesn't mean we will get a perfect end result, as quantization can create noise. But higher bit depth just gives us more accurate quantization so the quantization errors are even quieter than we will possibly hear. 16 bits give us 96db of dynamic range, and quantization errors are in the least significant bit, so unless you're paranoid that someone is going to turn your song up to the point that it will literally kill them and hear quantization errors, this isn't a problem, and neither are lower sampling rates. This is how audio works, and 192khz is not the holy grail of mixing.
The only reason to work at such high sample rates is it it was already recorded this high, and you know you'll need to do a lot of stretching and time adjustments. More samples can make these adjustments less dramatic.
More importantly, if you're into any song ever on any online service, then clearly sample rates don't matter that much. Most services use MP3 or CD quality WAV.
You need the DAW that has the most tension and release. And can resonance. With frequencies.
You need the DAW that has the most tension and release. And can resonance. With frequencies.
Close. Cubase is a tension DAW, it is the type of DAW that in some situations work the best for certain parts of a production. Why, because it is absolutely brutal towards the user about latency.
Remember that tension and release is something that works multi-dimensionally and hierarchically, like this:
T = Tension
R = Release
1:T->R...
...|
2:T -> R -> T -> R...
...
Please remember that still today a pro production is album oriented, so when you plan your project you might want a few of the songs on the album to be pure tension songs in order to balance out the energy of the album as a whole. A DAW like Cubase running at 44.1 kHz sample rate is an excellent choice for these types of songs on the album, while song nr 3 and/or 4 on the album might be best recorded at 384 kHz sample rate using a DAW software that supports such a sample rate. And on some of the songs on the album you might want to use a mixed set of DAW software in the same production.
Can a tension song on an album pop into a hit? Sure, it's all about the energy within the context. View an album as a field of energy with shifting energy density that the listener walks through. (similar to what a life experience might be) Use that energy density to your advantage.