neil banging out the tunes

you can change the arrange view to show spectrograms instead of peaks for waveforms--this means you'll almost certainly not miss any part where there's a signal! i made a gif (above) to demonstrate the difference when zoomed out on a relatively quiet passage in a mix project. the action is called "toggle: show spectrogram" and i just put a button into my layout for it. nice!!

if you currently use audacity to make music (or really as anything more complicated than a glorified tape recorder), you should really check out reaper. it is paid software (though it's quite cheap by DAW standards, only $60 for most people), but reaper is in fact winrar-style nagware that will not stop you from using all of its features if you exceed the 60-day trial period. you should buy it if you can afford it though because it's great and the dude who makes it deserves all the dollars in the world.

reaper has a huge number of features oriented around music production that audacity lacks (although audacity is getting better FAST). a big one is that audacity recently started letting you use VST effect plugins (which is awesome) but still can't host VST instruments because it doesn't have a MIDI sequencer. reaper can do that! unlike more expensive DAWs like FL studio and ableton, reaper doesn't come with any instruments, but super capable instruments like vital, decentsampler, and the eternal u-he triple cheese, zebralette, and podolski are available for free!

unlike a lot of free or cheap software reaper is professional grade stuff and you can make anything your heart desires in it. ada rook of black dresses is a reaper user, so here's something you can make in reaper.

Reaper is great. I bought a license more than 10 years ago in a failed attempt to make custom Rock Band tracks for the Rock Band Network (rip), and the license still works. Great software.

cosigned reaper is some software of all time (very complimentary). it does NOT condescend to the user, it is fucking powerful. check out how fucking enormous this context menu is. isn't that cool. yeah the whole program is like this. it's great