Seems like every time I mention it, somebody gets pissed off, but I'll answer truthfully....
Why? It's fast. Faster than any DAW you've ever worked with. It's fucking lightspeed ...because it's written in assembler. Not additional hardware required. No choking CPU, no bullshit. It just works. ...and it's only 1.49 megabytes.
...I'll go out on a limb here & I know I'll take some flak for it, but it will take on a full blown PT HD system for considerably less money. No tie-downs to proprietary hardware required. No add in "processor cards" to make up for weak programming.
Other things: Better interface... actually sold my Mackie Control that I bought to work with Sonar when I switched over to SAW. It was integrated even tighter, but I found it was just slowing me down. Bob redesigned the mouse/keyboard functions to work for audio.
Softedge, great channel FX, great routing, multi-track layers (try flying in 8 drum takes with 19 mics in & out of the mix without stopping playback on any other DAW) and fabulous tech support. I had an issue crop up one day & I was able to call the programmer at his home to resolve the issue. I've only had to to do that once, but it's nice to have that to fall back on.
IMO the only thing missing is a "beat detective" routine. I've been pestering Bob for it for a while now & it looks like he'll add it sometime soon.
Bob doesn't advertise, so he never gets any press. You'll never see a review of SAW in anything like Recording, EQ, Mix, or Pro Audio Review. I didn't go with who had the best ads, I went with what I thought would be the best tool to work with. ....I've been working with it for 4 years now & never regretted the switch.
BTW, here's a wiki quote about assembly language vs high-level language:
Higher-Level Languages, such as Fortran, C, Ada and others, were designed with the express purpose in mind to avoid programming in assembly. Assembly language programming, as shown above is tedious, and the large amount of code required to even perform simple tasks increases the probability of bugs in your code. Therefore, people generally write code in higher-level languages, and let the compilers do the tedious work of writing out the assembly code, and converting to machine code. However, there are a number of occasions when programming in assembly is beneficial, and other occasions when it is required:
1. When writing operating system kernels.
2. When writing bootloaders.
3. When writing device drivers.
4. When writing code that is speed sensitive.
5. Writing code to take advantage of specific hardware features.
Assembly has a number of advantages over high-level languages, and a good programmer will know when and how to exploit these advantages. First, assembly language is close to the machine. High-level languages are written to be portable to many different platforms, and therefore high-level code cannot possibly take advantage of the special features found on all platforms. Also, writing in a higher-level language introduces code bloat: the compiler creates too much code to perform a given task. This means that optimized code written in pure assembly can frequently run faster, and the generated code is smaller than code written in high-level languages. However, assembly suffers from the fact that it is slow to write, and is prone to bugs and errors.
Here's a link to that page:
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Programming:Assembly
