For the price i would say this is a pretty ok deal. the other Digital Audio workstations(DAWs) offer a lot of the same features. I was a protools engineer for a while and some of the things they are touting are far from new and protools usually lagged behind sonar and cubase in raw feature set. I have been punting on upgrading from protools 7.4(5+ years) and m-audio delta 1010lt and 44 for a very long time (10 years). What I want to see is hardware that takes advantage of the huge throughput of thunderbolt or usb3, that allows for higher quality audio and many ins and outs. as far as software Reaper - i havent used it in a year or so - for the price is the best DAW on the market no question.