THAT is exactly why my dedicated DAW PC build is indeed *just* for efficiently doing audio and some video editing and with Reaper, I am guaranteed a few years at least in future of absolutely free upgrades and features that even to this day the so called industry standard, AVID Pro Tools users, still do not have the flexibility and even some cool features that an open source DAW in which the dedicated developers *actively and fervently* listen to their huge user base in order to implement or even improve/tweak things; at $60. for a non-commercial license, this pleases me because even on the Cockos Reaper Forum, you get support from people that do not have pretentious snarky attitudes. You would be surprised at how many Pro Tools users have switched and AVID being asses, they have gone out of their way to ensure that REWIRE is a mess if a Reaper user tries to integrate within AVID products to include the video editing products AVID owns.
I am not trying to "sell" Reaper to anyone but their philosophy is very much akin to how LINUX is to Microsoft/Apple, giving people freedom to say even remain working perfectly fine on a 3.0 version of Reaper while a 4.7 newest edition is out.
Consumerism and marketing irks the hell out of me and some people really are slaves to it to point on another forum someone was actually trying to tell me that I was a "dinosaur musician" for preferring hardware synths and I did not feed into the argument when they started down the path that the Virus is surpassed by software/vsti and how the Virus sounds "thin" and how effects are only way it sounds beyond thin!
All I replied with is, "...and this is coming from someone that utilizes vsti's solely and has no issues oxymoronically stating/boasting about how they had plethora of vsti effects at their disposal for much better sound design than hardware?!!!"
As far as midi controllers go, Novation's announcement few days ago of new Automap upgrade ALSO added Automap to ALL their LEGACY controllers as well! That is very smart and progressive thinking. Am liking Novation/Focusrite more and more as I see a company that ALSO listens to their customers and has excellent customer support.
Early morning coffee rant over!!