Let me follow up on Terry's post, which dove-tails exactly what I was thinking when I first read this thread: I use Reason about twice a week now to create music beds for commercials and multimedia projects, and I am amazed at how versatile and inspiring it is everytime I use it. While many people use it to create dance-oriented music (it's very good for that), last week I used it to create a "majestic" orchestrated piano + strings/brass theme with tympanis and found that Reason provided everything I needed and made the job easy with only the stock samples that came with it, including a pretty good grand piano. Then I could save everything as one file including samples, sequences, effects, mixes etc. and export the final audio file as a WAV or MP3 file. I usually just do some minor tweaking to the exported audio file using Sound Forge to make the finished product. And since this is a low-fat, low-CPU-load program you can really create some monster racks and tracks even on a laptop. I also recently had to sync some music cuts and sound effects to video and the producer was really impressed at how easily I could do that with Reason. This program is inexpensive for what all it delivers: about $350 street.

Reason is an essential part of my toolbox and it's the first thing I turn to when creating new music from scratch. If you haven't tried it there is a free demo available from Propellerhead: http://www.propellerheads.se/index.php3