unsure what production software to buy for orchestral music
 

I've been doing research on good music production software to buy for the music I want to make (Orchestral) but I'm having a heard tom doing it. I've heard that FL Studio is good, but I've also heard good things about Cubase and Ableton Live. There's so many options with so many variables, I can't make up my mind. My only big concern is cost sense I'm trying not to blow a bunch of money. Just enough to get me what I need. if anyone has any suggestions, PLEASE COMMENT! Thank you!

I recommend garageband. If you have any apple product then garageband is a really good, free DAW. I don't really know about orchestral music but it is working really good for me.

Also, I've heard that Audacity is a good one, it is free but I've never used it so I cant say anything about it. Hope this helps!

I'd recommend Reaper. The non-commercial license, which still let's you make a bit of cash from the music you make, is relatively cheap. Also, it's a good DAW.

You can do most everything in Audacity that you can do in every other DAW, but it's opensource freeware so there's really no intuitive GUI like the ones you pay for because it's stripped down to bare bones. It's very similar to using GIMP instead of Photoshop, or Blender instead of 3DStudio. You can get the same basic results with either one.

Plug-Ins are where opensource applications usually fall short though because software companies that are in it to make money need to stay relevant with other apps and they pay people to develop bridges between the two. It's just good marketing as where opensource has no marketing to speak of really and is based on the work of volunteers. A good example would be that I can seamlessly integrate an EasyDrummer track into Reaper with their developed plug-in and even have some control over it within Reaper, but I have to manually export a compatible audio file of a drum track from EasyDrummer and then manually import that file into Audacity to get the same result, and if I want to change something, I have to repeat the process all over.

You pay for convenience but if you're just looking for something basic to mix audio files, then Audacity would be a great choice.

As the question is for software to produce orchestrated music in, I would assume that means using virtual instruments / orchestral libraries. Then you should have a proper DAW, not Audacity imo.

True dat