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This post really makes me appreciate the engineering that led to the completely usable and powerful DAWs that ran on the comparatively weak hardware of the late
by elevaet 3y ago
This post really makes me appreciate the engineering that led to the completely usable and powerful DAWs that ran on the comparatively weak hardware of the late 90s, early 2000s like Cakewalk, Cubase, Logic.
- weinzierl 3y agoReaper, let's not forget Reaper. Fully blown DAW with brilliant UI in like 15 MB. Cross-platform too.
- elevaet 3y agoAbsolutely, such a great project! I understand one of the guys behind the project is doing it more or less out of passion as he made his money from WinAmp back in the day?
- deckard1 3y agoand without GPUs, mind you. And a lot of that trickery probably came down to: let's write everything in assembly. Fruity Loops was absurdly fast in the early 2000s and was written in Delphi and assembly, IIRC. In 2023 DAWs should not be that difficult to make fast. It's a solved problem. Multi-channel audio processing is one thing that modern CPUs should not even break a sweat at. I believe this article has uncovered the basics that have made every DAW complex from the beginning, but seems to be focused on efficiency with your bog standard off-the-shell GUI library. That's the mistake, IMO. None of the DAWs I know of use, for example, standard GTK. Even the ones that do use a GUI toolkit use it minimally, for the file pickers and configuration. Not as the primary interface for the DAW itself. You need to go lower level and remove the layers of cruft. I mean hell, adding language bindings on top of everything is going to add yet another layer of inefficiency.
- elevaet 3y agoOh yes, thanks for the reminder about Fruity Loops, another great piece of software from that era. Not a DAW, but I really miss CoolEdit