I would recommend FL Studio for anyone who wants to get their hands on music making or even just recording audio for videos. I would suggest making the somewhat small investment and trying it out, you could end up with a career from it. For beginners I would definitely suggest watching online courses/tutorials as they helped me a lot and it will for you as well. Also, I would recommend using third party plugins which will help in fine tuning your projects and overall produce much better music/recordings. FL Studio is well suited for businesses and personal use to make music. I would confidently say that its one of the best DAW to start making music.
It is simply easy to use and serves the function that it needs to serve. Once you get the hang of the basic functionality and a few of the keyboard shortcuts, it will be extremely easy and quick to write out music. The option to go back and transpose to another key without writing the whole thing out again is crucial.
Once Sibelius is purchased, the user is given one year of unlimited free customer service to help in using the product. After that first year, users can either pay to utilize customer service with questions or use online helps, which are very helpful. One of the bigger issues I had was getting the sounds to work properly because my Internet connection wasn't consistently working well enough to accommodate the large files, which were taking up to 10 hours to download. The download would fail, and then I'd have to start over. I wanted to get a CD sent to me but was told this would be very costly, and so I declined. I wasn't happy with the lack of customer service in that situation but was eventually able to get the files to download and the software working properly.
In selecting this software, we investigated and considered others. We found that FL Studio had a good price point and the life time free version updates made it a one time purchase.
Of these the most cost effective for us was Ableton Live and FL Studio with Propellerhead Reason being a slightly different product.
We found that FL studio had a wider feature set and was more suited to our use, where as Ableton Live would be better if live music performance was a requirement, in our case it was not.
I have not used Finale exclusively, but I know friends/colleagues who have. In the past, it was complicated to transfer and edit any of the music they created for me because it would not transfer to Sibelius. As a result, I would have to request the edits I wanted and ask them to make the changes themselves. If I wanted to make any changes later, it was extremely inconvenient to do so, and I often chose not to, as I did not want to bother anyone other than myself to do any edits after-the-fact. Though it is now possible to transfer Finale files to Sibelius through creating .xml files and then importing as .sib files, the files still do not entirely retain all of the integrity of the original composition (as completed in Finale). Sometimes text and markings are missing, microscopic, or shifted once opened in Sibelius. Text fonts must often be edited. When working with other major music publishers, it has been extremely convenient and helpful to have the same software.
