Renoise: incredibly accurate timing. Yes demoscene music makers, but it's also exceptional at producing anything that's got to have incredibly tight timing. It even excels at sending MIDI data without jitter.
Also, as the heir apparent of the tracker movement (its audio can be a heck of a lot better than the early generations of trackers, and it's happy to work with multichannel DACs for outboard analog mixing) it offers a distinct way of thinking about sound-making: that old 'tracker' way of composing. Since it's based on audio samples of arbitrary fidelity, it's not restricted to 'demo-y' sounds: you can just as well use huge 24-bit high sample rate sounds, or use it as a way of layering audio tracks as one might in a DAW.
I'm not involved with Renoise as a company, BTW, but I AM completely charmed by it and own both it and Redux (the DAW plugin version).
Yes a thousand times, dude, Renoise is that good. It's my main DAW and I feel really spoiled by it, specially by its incredible stability.
Everytime I read articles or forum posts about people talking about their DAWs I hear people complaining about ableton/fl studio etc being unstable, crashing on odd occasions etc. I have never experienced a crash on Renoise, not even using multiple VSTs etc, even some buggy ones that are prone to crashing or scrambling other DAW's internal state hehehe... I have composed tracks on Renoise for over 6 hours to only them realize I hadn't saved a single time.
Why am i giggling sooo much :-) The whole talk about it being a 'industry standard'.
I missed Renoise on your list:
- Renoise: Focus on appealing to former tracker users and demoscene music makers.