A few weeks ago I toyed with the idea to look for a local sequencer software, because my beloved Splice sequencer sadly is just too buggy: playback glitches, frozen browser and even memory access violations; sometimes had to close a hanging Firefox by the taskmanager.
So I checked different demo apps like FruityLoops, Reaper or Magix. Well, after hours of playing around I found they're all very fine, but seemed too complex for me to handle.
Anyway, last week the Splice server went down for unknown reasons and is still off today. Maybe they (actually Bram, who is the only one left) are preparing kinda new relaunch, or maybe Splice is history. Even if they come back, I can't imagine the sequencer is much updated - there's just no dev team anymore.

So I picked Reaper as a nice candidate and reinstalled it. There's a large community/forum behind and quite active developers, you can say there's almost weekly updates. Finally I could start mixing my new song. And I had the additional feature of MIDI/VSTi, which I was pretty much happy about, because we all know of its flexibilities. But...
... while Reaper's audio features are highly sophisticated, its MIDI implementation/features aren't that perfect: especially the use of VSTi is still buggy in some situations, resulting in a glitchy playback in which peaks and noises make it almost impossible to work with. At least the rendering works fine...
As a workaround I may have to convert my MIDI to audio (by extarnal tools like Synthfont) before it can be used in Reaper, so it will be a similar procedure as before, when I worked with the Splice sequencer.

What a pity... the world is looking forward to drop a man on mars, but we poor musicians still have to fight with lousy DAWs, haha.