I thought I’d try Instacomposer and bought Blue Cat to deal with the issue of multichannel input into Ableton Live, but found that wasn’t a workable solution.[ I’m slightly surprised Plugin Boutique didn’t bring that out in their product videos suggesting this route]
I bought Cakewalk when it was version 2.1 (3.5 inch floppy distribution…) but largely stopped using it when I switched to Live. However, since Bandlab purchased this from Gibson, and what was Sonar 3 can now be downloaded for free.
So I loaded up Instacomposer on a track and added a track with TTS (the default midi player for the product) and that worked without any fiddling,
So it seems to me a viable plan could be to use it within Sonar to find some roughly acceptable piece, then just drag it to Live or Scaler as the case may be to use it as a starting point.
I haven’t had much chance to explore Instacomposer (and don’t a priori have high hopes for it (without any rationale for saying this) ) but it may be useful for doing the odd baseline or whatever.
However, I thought it would be worthwhile to share this free and simple approach.