I would say that there's a pair of taxonomies, one being of audio content (social audio, radio, film, multimedia art, music, etc) and one being of the level of user (hobby/beginner, student, pro, academic, etc) and the problem with DAWs are that they generally gravitate towards where the money is, which are pro users in music and film.
I think that another axis to take into consideration is the extent to which audio will originate outside the computer. The needs & desires of people recording actual performances on some kind of instrument (even an electronic one) are going to differ significantly from people working, as they say, entirely in the box.
>> problem with DAWs are that they generally gravitate towards where the money is, which are pro users in music and film.
Is that the case though?
Ableton and such don't charge per revenue as far as I'm aware. They charge same whether you are scoring a $500mil movie or fooling around after hard day of coding.
And I feel in sheer numbers, latter outweighs the formers by several orders of magnitude. All forums I've been to are filled by, at best, "enthusiasts". Thousands upond tens of thousands of us with some disposable income we give to synths and software to tinker with :-).
I think that's a solid observation. I just like to add a 3rd dimension to the taxonomy, which is the relationship of the user to the finished work (is it for money? is it for anyone else? is it for fun? is it meaningful?) because I think this impacts the user's relationship with the tools.
