That said you do get a ton of cool stuff with the higher editions
A subscription to splice or other sample/preset libraries opens up a world of possibilities as well
Having the full edition also makes it possible to use more of the example projects and templates out there, and you can follow along with the tutorials from Mr Bill too!
DAWs and MIDI controllers are sort of like keyboards, notebooks, or text editors. They all do the same things, but when they're your primary work surface little idiosyncrasies add up to flow-wrecking annoyances.
Lots of people love Logic, but I'm not one of them. It's not anything wrong with the product, it's just that Live clicks with my brain in a way that Logic doesn't. The Live interface has things arranged where I expect them to be. Logic hides everything in drawers.
That said, your teenager might be using Garage Band because they really like it, or they might use it because it's free and what they have. On the controller side, if they have experience with piano, they probably want a keyboard. If they don't, they might or might not want piano keys. If they do play piano, they will have preferences about key feel and size. My old piano muscle memory can't handle mini keyboards, for example.
You get lite with hardware purchase or in some magazines.
https://help.ableton.com/hc/en-us/articles/209775685-Get-a-L...
Ableton suite is amazing because of all the content you get with it (instruments, effects, samples), but lite comes with enough to get you going and you can always add vsts and samples from 3rd parties.
It has a hard limit of 8 tracks, Intro doubles that to 16, while Standard is the first version without limitations. Intro should be more than fine for most beginners.
I’m working on two ARA-2 plugins so this is a small bit of good news.
I'm not a fan boy of any companies or tools, but Live has continued to impress me with each release.
We seek to complement the user by giving them access to a mix and master engineer, not replacing them like with Suno. We've got a booth at MONO sf this weekend at the Midway in SF, come find us! if you're on the fence, email me for a promo code to the conference!
The problem I have with the AI mastering is it seems to be a bit clumsy with making the master fit the song. A lot of these tools just have simple buttons like "low, medium high", and seem to default to really squashing the dynamics to achieve maximum loudness. I have worked with both human mastering engineers and AI mastering, and I would say a decent human mastering engineer is noticeably better at feeling out the songs and finding the right balance.
To your question though, it's a chatbot so tell it you want your track to sound like eg Polo and Pan, it'll look for ways to enhance it in their style rather than a simple small/medium/large knob. It'll load one of the built-in mastering chains and tweak the settings on those, or if you have a preference, you can tell it that too.