T7 went free only once Waveform became the paid Tracktion DAW

The tool moment

Tracktion's own site shows T7 was still a paid product deep into 2018, not free from 2017 as sometimes assumed. A 24 June 2018 capture lists T7 DAW as a $60 purchase, with a separate T7 DAW OEM edition free only “with the purchase of many digital products from Behringer and Mackie,” while T6 carried the “FREE Workstation App For All” badge. By a 21 October 2018 capture, the labels had swapped: T7 was now marked “FREE Workstation App For All,” and the OEM hardware-bundle role had moved to the newer Waveform line as “Waveform OEM.” Tracktion's newly launched Waveform, described on the same pages as “the most creative, inspirational and affordable digital audio workstation ever created,” had by then taken over as the paid flagship, freeing T7 to become the no-cost tier as T6 and T5 had before it.

What the documents show

These are Tracktion's own storefront pages, snapshotted by a third party rather than published with a change-log entry, so the exact week T7 changed price cannot be pinned down; only the year is established with confidence, bracketed between the June and October 2018 captures. A 31 May 2019 capture confirms the free T7 tier held for at least another year, alongside Waveform as the paid product and OEM bundle. Nothing in any capture describes T7 and Waveform as sharing an identical feature set; Waveform is marketed separately, with its own tiers and a Bundle Builder tool T7's pages do not mention.

What stays with the musician

Making an older DAW generation free widens who can open a session, but it does not equalize what they can do inside it. A musician choosing T7 because it costs nothing is choosing a specific, frozen feature set from Tracktion's product line, not a lighter version of the current Waveform release; deciding whether that older toolset covers a given session's needs, or whether the paid upgrade is worth it for a particular project, stays with the person picking software, not with the free-tier label itself.

Judge it by listening

None of the archived pages make an audio-quality claim about T7 versus Waveform, since the change described here is commercial tiering, not a sound-engine difference. This is editorial guidance beyond the source: before committing a project to a free, no-longer-current DAW generation, render a test mix and compare its plugin and bounce behavior against the current paid version, since a free tier's lack of updates can surface compatibility issues a listening test on the finished bounce will catch before a deadline does.

• Does a free legacy DAW still open every plugin format a given session actually needs?
• Would this project's mix decisions change if it were started instead in the current paid Waveform release?
• Is free here a no-strings download, or does it depend on owning specific hardware, as T7's OEM edition once did?

T7 becoming Tracktion's free-for-all DAW was a product-line succession, not a standalone giveaway: it happened once Waveform existed to replace it as the thing being sold, and Tracktion's own pages date that handover to 2018, not the year sometimes attached to it.