Rich, honestly, and I'm embarrassed about this, I can't compare them. I love Cool Edit for what I used it for. That was, as I said, for file editing. I used it for language file recording and editing. Almost always just mono files. This was before my trying to learn guitar. It never occurred to me to use it for a DAW. (And I still run Windows XP so never had issues with compatibility.)

When I started to learn guitar and finally started to dab my toe in recording everyone on the forums was raving about Reaper. So I just bought it and started learning it! I guess I'll have to go back and look at Cool Edit for multitrack recording.

Sorry I can't give a better comparative analysis.