As will be obvious, there exists a wide spectrum of music-recording and post-production chores for which a fully-featured DAW is the obvious solution. Identifying the niche that you or your studio currently occupies – and being aware of how you might want to take advantage of new creative and commercial opportunities – is what separates the wanna-be's from the true innovators. Because, while it makes little sense to select a DAW that is overkill for recording and editing (for example) a couple of your band’s weekly concerts to prepare CD-Rs for group members, you may nevertheless like to consider a system that would allow expansion at a later date—if you are looking to do more down the road.

For example, all you need now might be a two-track system with limited mixing, EQ and compression – maybe you are doing nothing more fancy than removing false starts, and re-sequencing the live tracks. But suppose you want to record the rhythm section from those live dates and then replace the solos and vocals at a later date. Or maybe add some synthesizer overdubs to thicken out the sound? Now you are likely to be asking more of the DAW. You’ll need to be able to handle both replay sources from and recording inputs to a variable number of tracks. Not to mention being able to set up separate monitor or foldback mixes from the older and new material, so that everybody involved in the project can accurately gauge how the overdubbed contributions blend with the live tracks.

For these and other applications, a DAW capable of handling recording, editing and playback from as any as 64 audio tracks might be optimum, working with a virtually unlimited number of virtual tracks. But with so much going on, some form of high-resolution on-screen moving faders and editable mix automation is pretty much an essential.

Control surface for the high horsepower TDM systems

Also, you would greatly benefit from visual display and editing of automation envelopes, including flexible and intuitive cut, paste and drag operations within the edit window, with cue-point memories and other useful “paste-to-now line” functions.