&gt; much worse than they actually sound<p>UI is usually bad indeed, but I wouldn&#x27;t really care that much if the actual effects would be done alright. They are not.<p>&gt; I&#x27;d personally like to see a real contender for open source clone of Propellerhead Reason<p>Well, doesn&#x27;t really matter: the point still is there&#x27;s no decent FOSS DAW. Ardour is not terrible, but… just no. And there still is no real use for DAW without any instruments or effects anyway.<p>But, as a side note, I&#x27;ve never heard of a musician writing some more or less sophisticated music (that is not Prodigy) with Reason. I&#x27;ve used it for a while, and it&#x27;s pretty nice, all this &quot;hardware interface&quot; concept is really cool, but it&#x27;s very limited and very limiting. It&#x27;s like, well, using Mac or Windows vs using Linux — what I can do is strictly defined by the developer, no much freedom out there. Cubase is complicated and glitchy as hell, but with it I really can do pretty much whatever I want. Simpler (and much cheaper) alternative to Cubase I would say might be Reaper, but not Reason.<p>&gt; Sample libraries aren&#x27;t &quot;source code&quot;<p>No, that&#x27;s not the problem. Sample libraries for KONTAKT are sample libraries for KONTAKT. It is not a bunch of .wav files, it&#x27;s a proprietary format, which wouldn&#x27;t work with some other sampler out of the box — unless you specifically make it to, which (I guess) might be not trivial, as it&#x27;s made specifically to avoid competition. So even if you buy sample libraries for that, or download it from torrents or whatever — it&#x27;s not about library licensing, it&#x27;s about being unable to use it with anything but KONTAKT.