This tutorial comes up every couple years and it's got a pretty elegant UI and presentation. It seems to be a perennial HN favorite. But I got a free copy of

This tutorial comes up every couple years and it's got a pretty elegant UI and presentation. It seems to be a perennial HN favorite. But I got a free copy of Ableton (not Ableton Live IIRC) with an interface I bought and Holy cow if Ableton isn't the most painful and disgusting UI I've seen in a while. It took me about 2 seconds to get the interface working correctly in Garage Band. I literally gave up after an hour of trying to get Ableton working correctly. There were like 1000 buttons and one of them had a default value that made the interface not work right or the audio not get routed into the track. IIRC I got it to the point the audio was coming into ableton and it looked like it was working but then nothing ended up in the recorded track. I play guitar as a hobby.. I have no time do put up with something like ableton, I want absolute minimal time spent futzing with a DAW and maximum time with my hands on the actual guitar. This was all on top of me being a software engineer (which maybe made me less tolerant of figuring out the UI) and my interface coming with a long series of video tutorials on how to get Ableton working with the interface. Meanwhile again, got it working in about 2 seconds without looking at the help in Garage Band. A lot of the differentiating features don't matter that much, micing my amp and using my pedalboard/amp sounds better than the synthetic sounds in the DAWs unless I spent a bunch more money. Ableton reminds me of "configuration over convention" or something. Or ancient MS/IBM software where the user has to figure out 1000 options to get anything working.