Seeking recommendations for audio creation tools for the Mac or iPad

It's no pro tools, but you might try garage band for basic midi music creation etc. It's pretty good for what it is, and it's mostly accessible, other then automation, as far as I can tell. I use it to create many track ambient music, and it's good for that because of how simple it is. You might also look into reaper, which is a lot less expensive then pro tools. I don't know how accessible this app is on the mac, but it's very usable on windows now.

I can't say much about reaper on the mac, and I no nothing about the other work station you mentioned, but reaper is like a fifty dollar version of pro tools. It's super powerful and a lot of people are moving to it. Once again, I don't know anything about it's accessibility on the mac.

So the folks who develop NVDA created add-ons for Reaper to make it more accessible. This was done for both Windows and the Mac. You can check out OSARA here. https://github.com/nvaccess/osara

Hi all.
Just wanted to let you know that there is a version of Pro Tools that is absolutely free. It's called Protools First. Hope this helps.

I believe Reaper is about $60 U.S. I have the 60 day trial version. I honestly don't know how it compares to Sonar as I never used that product. I only listened to recorded demos. At any rate, I've heard a lot of buzz over Reaper lately and it seems like a very powerful DAW. Check out these podcasts from Audio Pizza and Cool Blind Tech to hear more about Reaper. The audio pizza podcasts are done on a Mac while the Cool Blind Tech podcasts are done on Windows. I believe the same tasks can be accomplished on both operating systems so I think the Windows demos are worth listening to.

http://audio.pizza/reaper01/
https://coolblindtech.com/reaper-on-windows-episode-1-general-introduction-why-reaper-is-awesome/