I think I was at my most creative and prolific around 20 years ago, with my best stuff being released around 2007-2008. I started dabbling with Cakewalk around 200, which later became Sonar.

But then Sonar took a direction that really messed up my workflow.
But not long after I suddenly had an unrelated career.
And then I had a family to take care of.

In other words, life got in the way. Plus I had permanently migrated to Linux, and despite many attempts I couldn’t quite get into it.

However, thankfully I found Bitwig, and I feel like I’m not at a place where I can start doing it properly again. But of course, all the synths and plugins I used way back when are probably out of date. So any tips for replacing these?:

Native Instruments Guitar Rig - Guitar effects and processing
Edirol Orchestral - Orchestra oriented softsynth
Steinberg Hypersonic - general purpose softsynth
Drumkit from Hell - Drum softsynth

Also, is there anything new in terms of tools, techniques, and processes that have emerged during the past 20ish years I should be aware of?