That said, there must be reasons why Live is sooo popular...?
There was a time when it was all the rage. How things change.
the clip launching workflow makes it a great file for live sets, improvised electronic (or any other kind of music based on blocks), and so on
very streamlined for easy focus - many DAWs suffer from windows upon windows, in Live it's all (including built-in fx and instruments) in a single, non-MDI window, and all tools, fx, instruments, windows use the same widgets and concepts (not the case in e.g. Logic or Cubase)
automatic (and good) sync-to-tempo for audio, including several manual manipulation options (pitch/tempo/combo/etc)
opinionated fx and built-in instruments tuned to electronic and experimental music (including a full-on built-in version of Max, one of the most popular visual programming environments for building your own fx, instruments, audio/midi processing tools, and so on)
I've been using Live since 2015. My take on what it's got going for it is that it has a relatively streamlined interface, and is fairly opinionated on a particular way of setting things up, which makes learning it quicker. Instruments and effects for each track across the bottom. Make a bunch of tracks whose output by default feed into groups, which you can treat as busses. You can override the routing, but the default is easy to understand and straightforward. The stock devices cover 95% of what you need to do, generally "sound good" out of the box, and Max For Live provides a way to make custom devices that seamlessly integrate into the DAW.
Also the clip launching stuff and integration with the Push is neat. I suppose more DAWs have that capability now, but in 2015, Live made it easy.
If I were to pick a new DAW I'd probably go with Bitwig. Live is starting to feel like legacy software to me. Max For Live is too low-level to do polyphonic instruments easily, but the visual node-graph approach is harder for me than writing code would be. It sometimes hangs for 30 seconds at a time while I'm trying to flesh out some ideas, and find myself annoyedly sitting there trying not to forget what I was trying to do while Live gets its shit together.
That's just not true. It's used all the time for experimental, decidedly not "4/4 dance music", for soundtrack work, and for many other things, including tracking regular rock and other such bands.
>As a classic example, I play a midi wind instrument which sends notes and breath control and pitch bend. If you use "scale time" on the midi track, it moves the notes and leads the breath control and pitch bend where it was, silently breaking the track. This is true also of pitch bend, modulation, and volume controls.
Well, all DAWs have similar quirks. Some don't have microtuning (Live does) so you can't play Indian or Arabic maqam scales. Others don't have MPE (Live does), or can't sync live drums to the DAW in real time so synths/arps etc match the tempo (Live does), and so on...
A good friend of mine uses Live heavily for creating music -- definitely not 4/4 dance music: https://album.link/i/1627338395 . He's mainly using acoustic recordings as samples though, so it sounds like your specific use case works better in other DAWs. I've never played with Reaper, sounds interesting!
The status bar in the bottom will say if you have "Time Selection" (Start, End, Length) or "Note Selection" (Time, Pitch, Velocity, Probablity).
Arrangement has a similar distinction between selecting time or Clips.
As a classic example, I play a midi wind instrument which sends notes and breath control and pitch bend. If you use "scale time" on the midi track, it moves the notes and leads the breath control and pitch bend where it was, silently breaking the track. This is true also of pitch bend, modulation, and volume controls.
I contacted them well over 10 years ago with a polite and careful bug report. Their original response was, "That is what it is supposed to do". I said "But all other sequencers stretch all the MIDI, not just the notes! And it breaks my tracks. Isn't there some way I can just stretch all the midi?"
"No, why would you want to do this?"
"Because I want to stretch existing MIDI tracks to match other tracks."
"You should record with a metronome so that the tracks are already in sync."
"But I already have these tracks. And also, when I am composing, I prefer to just play without a metronome, and then select the parts I like."
"You're just being difficult."
And they refused to respond after that. Years went by, and every year I saw some other sucker complaining about the same thing.
Well over a decade later, they finally implemented it - _except_ it's only for three MPE controllers, so it doesn't deal with breath control, classic pitch bend the way it has been sent by every single controlled before around 2021, modulation, or volume.
I have dozens of similar bugs.
Now I use Reaper. What a difference!