15 ms·

What Is the Future of the DAW?

196 points by sowbug 3y ago

taywrobel 3y ago
If anyone else is as frustrated as I was with the article mentioning “the DAW” 73 times without defining once what the actual acronym stands for, it’s “Digital Audio Workstation”.
- karmakaze 3y ago
  I wasn't in this instance, but am in general. For industry folks they probably don't even realize it's not a word--surprised it hasn't lowercased to daw by now /s.
- vladsanchez 3y ago
  +1 Feels like they don't care who's their readership. Felt like they told me: "If you're not in the industry, Google it." DAW : Digital Audio Workstation https://www.masterclass.com/articles/what-is-a-daw https://www.masterclass.com/articles/what-is-a-daw
  - capableweb 3y ago
    > +1 Feels like they don't care who's their readership. Felt like they told me: "If you're not in the industry, Google it." Caring about their readership is exactly what they're doing, just that you happen to not be what they think of when they imagine the typical reader. The typical reader is already into music production and with a 99% certainty know what a DAW is. I wouldn't expect every tutorial on "Google's Official Android Developer Blog" to explain that "JVM" means Java Virtual Machine, some resources really are for people who already know a bit about the subject area.
- _joel 3y ago
  DJ mag aint what it used to be. The top 100 is pretty much a joke to most people who care about music.
  - tomduncalf 3y ago
    Yeah the top 100 is super weird, it’s all these commercial EDM DJs but the weird thing is the magazine doesn’t otherwise really seem to target that audience. I don’t read it but I have come across some good long form pieces like this from them online, so actually I think they are trying to do some good stuff.
    - DevoidSimo 3y ago
      I'd imagine that it's because the DJs ask people to vote for them. A lot of the DJs I follow do that every year. If the big commercial DJs with the biggest following do that, then they would naturally land at the top.
      - tomduncalf 3y ago
        Yeah I guess what I mean is that it seems to go against the rest of their brand, the magazine usually covers slightly more underground dance music it seems - not super underground, still big names, but not stadium EDM stuff. Maybe their philosophy is that the Top 100 should be an open thing and they shouldn't restrict who can enter based on music style... to me, it makes DJ Mag way less credible, but I guess they probably make money out of the Top 100 being so big.
- cauthon 3y ago
  In the same way I don’t expect a biologist writing for biologists to explain “DNA” stands for “deoxyribonucleic acid”, it’s probably not necessary for a music producer writing for producers and engineers to define “DAW”. Users here probably feel the same way about HTML, FIFO, DAG, etc
- BigElephant 3y ago
  No. The main audience for this article already know what a DAW is
- KingEllis 3y ago
  100 percent
- bwanab 3y ago
  The fact that the article was in DJMag might have been a clue?
- dist-epoch 3y ago
  Defining DAW is like defining SQL. If you need the definition, you are definitely not the target audience.
- thr0waway001 3y ago
  D'OH!!!
- xcv123 3y ago
  [dead]
- RockRobotRock 3y ago
  In the time it took you to Ctrl+F DAW you could have googled it.
_joel 3y ago
The Logic screenshot with "Untitled" is triggering me.
PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
TFA starts down an important path - identifying different categories of users - but doesn't really get this quite right IMO. There are (at least) four categories of DAW users: 1. Professionals who are being paid to make music, and for whom time is essentially money. Tools that speed up the production of that music are both financially valuable to them, and also make their overall lives easier (if done right). 2. Musicians for whom making music is a creative act of self-expression. They are not being paid by the hour (of music, or of effort), they are not under deadlines, but they do want tools that fit their own workflow and understanding of what the process should look like. 3. People who just want to have fun making music. Their level of performance virtuosity is likely low, and the originality of what they produce is likely to be judged by most music fans to be low. They want results that can be quickly obtained and are recognizable musical in whatever style they are aiming at, and they don't want to feel bogged down by the technology and process. 4. Audio engineers in a variety of fields who have little to no interest/need for music composition, but are faced with the task of taking a variety of audio data and transforming it radically or subtly to create the finished version, whether that's a collection of musical compositions or a podcast or a move soundtrack. The same individual may, at different times, be a member of more than one of these groups (or other groups that I've omitted). The needs of each of these groups overlap to a degree, but specifically the extent to which the current conception of AI in music&audio can help them, and how it may do so, are really quite different. We can already see this in the current DAW world, where the set of users of DAWs like Live, Bitwig and FL Studio tends to be somewhat disjoint from the users of ProTools, Logic and Studio One. TFA acknowledges this to some degree, but I don't think it does enough to recognize the different needs of these groups/workflows. Nevertheless, not a bad overview of the challenges/possibilities that we're facing.
- thegagne 3y ago
  Any recommendations for #3? Particularly with low barrier of entry for kids? Something you can use a midi keyboard and a mic with?
  - PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
    Sadly, its the group I pay the least attention to. I suspect that today or next week, something browser based might be the best choice, but I can't tell you what. Apologies.
BryanLegend 3y ago
I too have been wondering what the future is for the Detroit Auto Workers....
roblh 3y ago
DAW version control is one of my dreams. If I could have a really tight git equivalent for reaper projects, it’d be so cool. Plugins are, as usual, the biggest barrier there. Doesn’t seem like there will ever be a good way to deal with different people having completely different plugin collections. Unless someone makes “Netflix but for plugins” or something. The other thing I saw the other day that I thought was cool was a reverb plugin that uses your GPU. Seems like the next step for modeling could easily be in that direction. Especially since the bar there is low, pretty much just the positively ancient UAD hardware acceleration cards, although UAD themselves seem to be going the opposite way and pushing native stuff now.
- eternityforest 3y ago
  In the open source world, a DAW could really just include everything. You'd still need plugins occasionally, but I don't see why there couldn't be a curated collection that covers all the basics.
- dleeftink 3y ago
  Re: point 1, I feel you! Any chance you have checked out Splice or other rent-to-own plugin providers? It's not quite Netflixy, but less steep compared to upfront VST purchases. [0]: https://splice.com/plugins/rent-to-own https://splice.com/plugins/rent-to-own
- kid64 3y ago
  Sounds like you're talking about both version control and project portability, which are different concerns. But with respect to version control, many systems like Cubase use XML project files. As long as you don't physically delete any audio from your disk, basic version control on your machine using git should be possible.
  - roblh 3y ago
    It’s true that you can dump a project into a git repo, but the real problem is diffing. It would be pretty miserable trying to reconcile any significant changes or conflicts. What I think would be cool is a tool for auditioning and merging specific changes that’s backed by git somehow. I’m not really sure what it would look like though.
dleeftink 3y ago
What is the future of the rotary phone? The typewriter? The floppy disc? None of these have dissolved completely; the rotary dial, the keyboard layout, the swappable storage medium still exist, especially in music production hardware. It just takes a company like Bitwig to come along and show how else these pre-existing interfaces can be modularised and combined, and some iterations of the Push controller[0] to uppend the traditional fingering required to play them. [0]: https://www.ableton.com/en/push/ https://www.ableton.com/en/push/
CrypticShift 3y ago
Despite (or maybe because of) following this space for more than 20 years, I would love a (good) book on the inner (recent) history of the music software industry (= DAWs/plugins). I fail to find even one book on the subject. Anyone ? There is this quote : "To know your future, you must know your past". I agree the cloud/AI combo is revolutionary, but we also need to dig a little deeper into the past to understand what is coming.
- eunoia 3y ago
  Very much agreed! If anyone knows of a good one I would love to read it as well.
bandrami 3y ago
I'm still getting used to the "new" scene-based model (which is I guess actually pretty old at this point) but it seems mostly unavoidable now that Ardour has switched to it in v7. Though I also think there's a lot of space on the low end of simple sequencers that the tracker renaissance is starting to fill.
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
  We haven't "switched to it" - it's an addition, not a replacement. ProTools just announced their version too. And yes, this model is roughly 20 years at this point (Ableton Live started at about the same as Ardour).
  - bandrami 3y ago
    Sorry, "switch" was the wrong word there, and I absolutely love the clip launcher. It's just kind of like the difference between editing text in a dumb editor vs an IDE or something like slime; lowering the "cost" of trying stuff absolutely changes how you think about your music and what you do with it.
    - PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
      As long as your music is "in the box", yes. If you're a classical oud player, not so much.
gizajob 3y ago
I wish someone would have put a bullet in Pro Tools two decades ago…
robenkleene 3y ago
The umbrella topic to this is one of my favorite topics in all of software and one where strangely we as an industry don't seem to have internalized its lessons: That the right approach to building a software program (like a DAW, NLE, bitmap/vector editor) emerges early. This is why these applications have lifespans measured in decades, and it's extremely rare for a new player to be able offer anything new, different, and valuable because the design space has already been solved for the problems these applications are solving. I wrote a piece on this subject, e.g., why, how, when software transitions do happen for these kinds of apps: https://blog.robenkleene.com/2023/06/19/software-transitions-the-five-year-rule/ https://blog.robenkleene.com/2023/06/19/software-transitions...
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
  I don't think this is true at all. For several different reasons: First, "the right approach" to building a software program is wildly unspecified: it could refer to the UI/UX aspects and/or the internal design, and these both have dramatic impacts on long term evolution. Second: the "right approach" for "making music" in the early days covered things as distinct as MIDI sequencers, trackers and early ProTools. It was far from obvious whether all 3 would continue to exist or some hybrid would become dominant (that's actually what happened - early ProTools did not do MIDI; the eventually archetype for DAWs turned out to be a blend of ProTools and MIDI sequencers, and trackers were discarded). Third: As I alluded to in my comment here about user groups, the right approach is going to differ for different workflows and use cases. FL Studio is not used by many audio mastering engineers; ProTools is not the choice of beat producers. Fourth: the goalposts keep moving with increasing compute power. The current idea of infinitely elastic audio that has become common among the most popular DAWs would have been unachievable in the early 2000s. Network bandwidth may have a similar impact. Fifth: the right approach (especially visible today) for some people who are generally "in DAW space" isn't a DAW at all, but hardware designs that bypass most of the functionality associated with traditional DAW design. The Elektron and similar h/w sequencers of the last 5 years are in some senses closer to plugins than they are to DAWs. Sixth: plugins - the ones associated with compositional elements (you could say sequencers but it goes beyond that) - have long been where the innovation has been taking place. These have evolved quite differently and more diversely than the DAWs that host them. For many users, plugins are the real workhorses and the DAWs are just the scaffolding around that. It would be hard to take a look at compositional plugins and conclude that the "right approach" emerged early.
te_chris 3y ago
How can you write this article only interviewing a bunch of startups? Tim Exile is a very interesting and visionary dude, but without serious contributions from Ableton or Apple on the DAW side this article feels a bit listless - none of these others are real players in the space.
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
  You might want to consider what that sounds like if you rewind it to say, 2002. Ableton is a small startup in Berlin. The dominant DAWs include several that don't even do MIDI. Apple hasn't yet acquired Logic by buying Emagic. Why would expect the next steps to come from "real players in the space", when the previous next steps did not? Look at how quickly Presonus managed to build Studio One to a crazy-level of credibility (it helps that they hired someone who had already done it twice).
  - te_chris 3y ago
    Because it’s not 2002? As you say, music production capable workstations didn’t really exist. To count out extremely capable incumbents in favour of reporting the opinions of bandlab who bought Cakewalk in a fire sale and haven’t really had much of a dent from what I can tell seems strange. No solid quotes from presonus either.
    - PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
      > As you say, music production capable workstations didn’t really exist. Didn't say that. They absolutely did! It took a small startup in Berlin to introduce the idea that maybe everything should be tied to the groove, always. That was not 100% revolutionary (Acid could do some of that), but it upended computer-based music production entirely. The incumbents are very, very unlikely to have access to people with a deep/serious interest in "AI & music" technology (maybe Apple?). Startups in this space are started by those people.
    - xcv123 3y ago
      > To count out extremely capable incumbents The article mentions those "extremely capable incumbents" are now stuck with legacy codebases. > music production capable workstations didn’t really exist Logic and Cubase were highly capable in 2002. They haven't progressed much in 20 years. The midi drum track editor in Cubase today looks the same as the 90s version.
matjus 3y ago
DAWs will need to refocus on managing recordings of live performances -- young kids are starting guitar bands again, and in a few years I think we will enter yet another period where electronic sounds are out of fashion. I'd also like to see more music creation nuts & bolts built into DAWs, like integrated lyrics, a quick way to shuffle pieces of a song like "bridge" and "verse", visualizations of key center shifts, chord builders and so on. A lot of that stuff is out there but it's definitely an afterthought.
- Stinky_Lisa 3y ago
  PreSonus Studio One has what you're describing. Im switching from logic pro to a new DAW and so far studio one has the most of my boxes checked.
  - ta988 3y ago
    What does it do that you prefer?
    - Stinky_Lisa 3y ago
      It runs on window, is not a subscription service, has a lot functions that I'm used to and has a lot of automated workflow possibilities. Theres a lot more it can do then I'm able to mention but here are some of the cool traits that stood out for me. It can group a chord progression and create a variety for multiple tracks without getting into the midi editor. Additionally, I can globally save those chords and use them down the line in any other project easily. Theres a lyrics function too where I can run parallel to a vocal track so the vocalist can pick up exactly where they need to and see what's coming. I've done a few demo projects and I really like it so far.
- spacemadness 3y ago
  I have wondered when the backlash, or maybe a sidelash, would start tasking place. I’ve been into many forms of electronic music and production since the 90s and right now if I was in my youth I might reach again for my guitar. Even though there is a lot of amazing stuff being produced that is not commercial/festival bound, there is a lot of money in EDM, probably too much, that would seem to push many people in the opposite direction away from the corporate driven machine.
barkingcat 3y ago
DAW innovation will only come with inventing new algorithms. There needs to be significant number theory and computer science algorithmic work related to sound and how we represent sound with data. GPU's currently cannot work with sound data in the processing chain, and multicore is basically just used to scale horizontally (ie to have more plugins or instruments) New algorithms are needed to scale out audio processing, as well as make use of new hardware types (for example, using the gpu)
- jrajav 3y ago
  You seem to think DAW makers don't already specialize a ton in DSP, algorithms, and concurrency - I can assure you that that's definitely the case, and that innovation and optimization happen at a very healthy pace. There is significant market pressure to run tracks and plugins in a highly optimized way. Several DAWs have a visible CPU-usage meter, and some allow users to directly configure a process isolation model for plugins. However, audio has a very different set of constraints from other types of workloads - the hallmarks being one worker doing LOTS of number crunching on a SINGLE stream of floating-point numbers (well, two streams, for stereo), that processing necessarily happening in SERIAL, and getting the results back INSTANTLY. Why serial? Because for most nontrivial audio processing algorithms, the results depend on not just the previous sample, or even chunk of samples, but are often a rolling algorithm that depends on a very long history of prior samples. Why instantly? Because plugins need to be able to run in realtime for production and auditioning, so every processing block has a very tight budget of tens of milliseconds to do all its work, and some of them make use of a lot of that budget. Also, all of these constraints apply across an entire track as well - every plugin on a track has to apply in serial, one at a time, and they need to share memory and act on the same block of audio. One thing you might notice is these constraints are pretty bad conditions for GPU work. You're not the first to think of trying that - it's just not a great fit for most kinds of audio processing. There are some algorithms that can run massively parallel and independent, but they're outliers. Horizontally scaling different tracks across CPUs, however, works splendidly.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
    To be fair, some of the things currently piquing people's interest are suitable for offline "massively parallel" processing ala GPUs. Source separation and timbral transfer would be the first two that come to mind.
_9hey 3y ago
A DAW is an all-in-one tool for composing, recording, arranging, mixing, and more. There are several factors that make this coupling necessary - the high performance requirements of DSP, the lack of better standards, and subject matter expertise. To innovate in the space, we need an ecosystem of interoperable tools which can be used seamlessly to perform the same tasks reliably. I think of the paradigm shift between apache http server and nodejs. Does the server run the code or does the code run the server? If DAWs switched to the nodejs model, what would be the entry point?
chaosprint 3y ago
I have been doing live coding for a while, but DAW is still important to me. I recently bought a Arturia keyboard in order to make some Trap and pop songs, and I immediately realised how important a seamless experience is between the DAW software and hardware. That kind of experience can't be replaced by AI. I am sure if Arturia makes a DAW, it would be a great one.
helloplanets 3y ago
I could see this opening up a new way to generate ideas from which you can start building, or what to add/remove when you're stumped. Maybe a way to create coherent arrangements from a curated list of one shot samples and short loops. And I wouldn't be surprised at all if the automated mixing/mastering services (of which there has been a bunch for years) take a giant leap forward because of better technology. But in general I'd imagine written language to be a pretty infuriating tool for describing what you want musically, when the most interesting parts of music are just about always the ones that you can't really capture with language. You can kind of outline things with written language and traditional music theory, but it's usually just a blurry version of why a specific piece of music resonates. I think that AI tools for music will most likely just stay as plugins within the more traditional DAW structure. There's only so many ways to represent an audio file, and a fader that controls the volume of a track or some other parameter. Like mentioned in the article, most of these additions take quite a bit away from the amount of control the artist has over the music, and lowering the amount of 'input resolution' in this sense is a block that's almost impossible to overcome.
- BandButcher 3y ago
  Agree with the text input being annoying and possibly more of an impedance. Personally i would prefer to speak out the sound i want (think beat boxing noises) and then have the generative ai give me an array of similar sounds and then i can just drag and drop where i want it Writing into a prompt feels opposite to the creative process but as a first pass its a cool tool, kudos
  - meowface 3y ago
    You can kind of do something like this with the Vochlea microphone and their corresponding software: https://vochlea.com https://vochlea.com I don't think it's combined with AI yet, but I have to imagine it's on the horizon. At the moment it basically just MIDI-fies your voice. You can raise or lower your voice pitch to turn a parameter knob, beat box to lay down percussion notes, etc.
RecycledEle 3y ago
DAW = Digital Audio Workstation. I expect the future of the DAW is a Xeon-powered machine from Dell or HP with Adobe Creative Cloud (CC.)
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
smetj 3y ago
DAWs just dont handle the jamming part very well ... Rythm generation, patterns, manual real time tweaking of sound and rythm ...
squarefoot 3y ago
What I really miss in DAWs is a drum arranging tool that goes beyond scores or xoxo grids. Those are good for editing patterns in atomic ways, but I'd love something to quickly record new patterns played on drum pads on the fly, with arbitrary duration, create a new pattern that inherits parts of the one I just recorded (to make variations and fills) just by hitting one key and/or sending a MIDI note from a controller, etc. Then after having a good number of patterns, I'd like something that shows them as nodes on screen so that they can be connected dynamically according to a predefined flow with possible variations triggered by MIDI notes (pedal switches) during live performances so that the flow can be altered either by prolonging/shortening a series of patterns, jumping here and there based on conditions, but the visual node representation would be vital to have a quick feedback that shows what is going to happen say 5 measures from now, for example by highlighting the nodes and flow that will be followed under the present conditions.
- bandrami 3y ago
  Have you ever looked at Non? It has a recording mode that is a lot like what you described if I understand you right. Development is kind of moribund but that can be an advantage in some ways.
  - squarefoot 3y ago
    Unfortunately it requires Jack, which for me has always been a source of frustration. I can get very low latencies and excellent stability using Alsa alone, so don't feel the need to change. Unfortunately as much as Jack is incredibly powerful, its UI to organize and connect stuff together is an example of how terrible usability choices can ruin an otherwise great software.
    - bandrami 3y ago
      It works fine on pipewire's jack emulation, which is much less of a headache
- mxmilkiib 3y ago
  Maybe https://github.com/ahlstromcj/seq66 https://github.com/ahlstromcj/seq66? Spiritual successor of seq24.
luckyt 3y ago
It would be great to see more innovation like AI in DAW tools, but there are some challenges. The main constraint is it needs to process in real time, allowing just a few ms to process a sample. Very few neural methods can work with that constraint, without it, they can't fit into the standard DAW workflow where you string together many plugins, each processing the signal in real time. There are some AI tools that work outside the main workflow, like for mastering after you're done with the DAW. But it's quite difficult to improve and bring new ideas beyond the typical signal processing modules without completely revamping the current workflow.
flipcoder 3y ago
I can see VSTs being replaced with AI that will create instrument sounds or effects based on description text
- recursive 3y ago
  That's just another VST with a different UI.
rcarmo 3y ago
No mention of Bitwig, which just keeps adding new features and modularity.
- sowbug 3y ago
  No mention of Bitwig, which just keeps adding new features and modularity. Bitwig is mentioned three times in the article. That said, I don't think the article author would consider Bitwig to be substantially novel compared to the other mainstream DAWs that inspired the sentiment behind the article.
- IAmGraydon 3y ago
  I want to love Bitwig, but the UI needs serious work as does compatibility with external controllers like the Novation Launchpad (which is what I sequence all of my music through). I’m hoping the next release addresses both of these.
pdntspa 3y ago
To be honest, I really like existing tools and workflows and I don't really want that to change. > Open a DAW from the year 2000 and it’s highly likely you’ll recognise the vast majority of the features — both functionally and visually — from any DAW you might use today. This assertion that "old is bad" really, really needs to die. Change for the sake of change is bad. I don't see why all these new innovations can't be baked into existing workflows in a natural and intuitive fashion. But then, in some cases, do I really want them? Like generative AI for music. I'm not sure but leaning towards no.
- matchagaucho 3y ago
  I like the existing workflows. But I'd really love to GPT-define reverb settings, song forms, channel inputs, ... tedious copy-paste tasks. A local LLM running on x86 or M2 would be great. But API callouts while waiting for the silicon/Cuda migrations are fine too.
  - plussed_reader 3y ago
    Nothing will homogenize pop like LLM inspired filters; the new presets of the dx7.
    - wormius 3y ago
      But that bass is so classic and tight!
      - plussed_reader 3y ago
        Don't you worry; Daniel E. and the streaming cartels will happily plug something like that into your sound hole.
- 8f2ab37a-ed6c 3y ago
  Having started music production only in the late 2010s, I was honestly shocked to see just how similar DAWs from even the 90s were to the current existing workflows. It feels like you could teleport a producer from a few decades ago into the modern day music software iteration and they would figure things out pretty quickly. Of course things are far, far more convenient and faster nowadays, but the fundamental paradigms are mostly the same. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6OaBkvwx7Hw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6OaBkvwx7Hw
jrm4 3y ago
Feels like "what is the future of the word processor" but with some weird expectation that you're expecting to see leaps and bounds. Look, FWIW, my favorite music making "stack" is - Fruityloops (as in, sure I'll use FL Studio but it was pretty much solid for me when it was called that) - Sony ACID. Still unbeatable to me for quickly layering/previewing multiple tracks of loops - Cool Edit Pro/Adobe Audition. Still much nicer than Audacity. I don't know why Audacity remains so popular, it's way clunkier than the above Ableton/Bitwig are also fun to play with and I could see them being indispensable for some, but what more do people need that you couldn't theoretically get "incrementally" or "with plugins?"
- tomduncalf 3y ago
  > I don't know why Audacity remains so popular, it's way clunkier than the above Presumably because it’s free, but I’m with you on the clunkiness. The UI looks very dated. I can recommend OcenAudio, which is free though not open source, and for me offers just the right level of functionality in a clean user interface. It’s very similar to how I remember the old versions of Cool Edit pre-Pro, which I thought were amazing bits of software.
  - MrVandemar 3y ago
    > The UI looks very dated. If the UI is clunky to use, that's something that needs to be fixed. If the UI works okay, but only looks dated, that's ... fine and there's every good reason to leave it as it is. Why? Because altering the look of the UI is strongly coupled with altering the usability of the UI. This leads to regressions in usability, making the product "look better" but "work worse". Leave things alone. I don't care if the UI looks like Motif or TCL or a TUI, but if it works in a smooth, intuitive and pleasing way, there's no reason to change it. The VIM interface is the very definition of "extremely dated", and that's fine.
    - jrm4 3y ago
      Yeah, I didn't just mean in looks though; e.g. Audition and Ocenaudio behave more like, e.g. a normal text box or other "editing space in a computer." Cutting/Pasting/Trimming etc are easier and more intuitive, with fewer clicks and less thinking about tracks and such.
Venn1 3y ago
I've been using Reaper as a digital mixer for live streams and recording podcasts. Great way to set up virtual channel strips for everyone and do proper mix-minus so we don't have to rely on software echo cancelation. Works a treat with netjack2 on Linux.
deleted 3y ago
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bentt 3y ago
In some ways, this is like saying "What Is the Future of the Piano?"
- zerbinxx 3y ago
  True - but there’s been a ton of stylistic and technological advancement of the basic 88 key device over the years - ranging from the development of key synths to (neo)classical reimaginings of how to use the hammers and strings to do something novel, not to mention AFX going nuts with little servos and player pianos, plus the development of jazz, ragtime, etc.
robust-cactus 3y ago
The only thing I want out of some of these tools is either teaching or giving me out of the box configurations that help me get a reallllly good mix. Why shouldn't every record today sound pro? Talent aside, I think they should be implementing some the typical tricks sound engineers/producers use automatically. I mean we're really talking about wave analysis then cutting of frequencies, boosting others. This can be automated based on a desired "genre/sound".
- ta988 3y ago
  There is quite a bit more to it, distributing sound in time frequency and space, sidechain effects that apply changes on some tracks depending on the sound of other tracks (one super common example is to silence slightly instruments to leave room in volume and frequency for a kick or drums in general). Frequency splitting, parallel fx chains. It is a bit tricky to automate and is really based on a feeling as each person doing the mixing will have a different vision and experience, and every song will have a different frequency/space/time complexity even in the same genre. But most advanced DAWs with integrated collection of effects like Live or Bitwig will have presets that you can start to build on. (I have not tried reaper for that, that's on my list)
extrn 3y ago
I’ve been working on a next gen DAW for a few years and this article misses all of my priorities. AI will encourage mindless replication; instead modern tooling should be analytical, precise, deliberate, flexible, and have layered complexity. My priorities are more in line with turning music production into an integrated and interactive development environment using modern design principles. Sub-modular capability, A/B testing, git integration, non-local collaboration, scientific visualization, notebook style experimentation, integrated synth build / play, web embedded optional interface, social sharing & tutorials, polyglot open source interface (primarily Rust), programmable behavior / macros, higher order signal dependency optimization, algorithmic mastering, targeted oversampling, creative process reusability, etc. You can solve the plugin issue by just synchronizing the output audio by the user that has it installed. Quality music production is an opague art and everything is way more daunting than it needs to be. Most producers just mess around until it sounds good and that gets people stuck in a local maximum of clarity. If it takes too long to experiment then you won’t get through the effort of trial for understanding. I have spent 15 years building tools as a research quant dev and also a dj (Extrn). There is a huge unaddressed gap in the audio space and huge barriers to entry in accessibility and cognitive burden.
- p1nkpineapple 3y ago
  Fascinating! Is there anywhere where we can follow development of this?
- skwosh 3y ago
  Spot on. It's telling that most DAW UIs are based on archaic ideas (like mixers/tracks and MIDI/step-sequencer grids). Even BuzzTracker (2009) outshines many of the current DAWs with DAG instrument/effects-chaining and arrow-key/cursor navigation. My post-graduate research concerned signal-rather-than-event-based generation/transformation of compositional data, integrated with textural/timbral synthesis. My current focus is building a DSP framework for this purpose in C++20 [1]. In any case I'm interested in following your progress, and happy to contribute code/ideas if you feel like collaborating (links in profile). [1] https://github.com/synthetic-methods/xtal https://github.com/synthetic-methods/xtal
vegadw 3y ago
I am a musician that mainly plays guitar and synths. I have a large eurorack, have tried nearly every MPE compatible synth & controller, and have a massive pedal board. I am also an embedded software engineer and have made audio plugins for VCV Rack. I have written blog posts [0] about MIDI to try to explain it to a technical-ish audience. I have written many, many more posts about why the way we interact with computers is ... sub-optiminal [1] and why new controllers are making it better [2]. I've also written a post reflecting on how AI Art tools like Stable Diffusion have/will affect artists [3] [4]. On my site, I have a list of DAWs and a simple Pro/Con view of each [5]. I have reviewed Emergent Drums, an AI drum-sample tool (and gave it a poor rating) [6] All of that credential waving is to say, I think about this a lot. The software workflow is so bad that I have resorted to buying an insane amount of hardware, so, what makes it so bad? * Latency correction hell. - Only an issue for musicians not working entirely digitally * Limited I/O (albeit this wouldn't be an issue if I could get away with using less hardware) - You can't use more than 1 audio interface at a time in Windows * Interface navigation hell - VSTs all load as individual windows - There's often still issues with DPI scaling * DRM hell on those virtual instruments * Software stability hell - Not all DAWs sandbox plugins * Complex routings are often complicated - In audio-contexts, we often want to pipe signal around in branching - diverging & merging - paths, often with signals from unrelated chains changing things (ex: sidechain compression from a bass drum) But I can almost forgive all of those issues. The real issue is and will continue to be MIDI. * 127 values for knobs? Really? That's quantization you can hear. * No good support for microtonal - Current hacks often break down realllllly bad with big scale. If you're in 31EDO, for example, you only get 4 octaves of range. * Clocking is a disaster, making swing, polyrhythms, etc. more of a mess than they need be. Those are issues that legitimately limit the expressiveness of all music creation. You can't fine-tune a value in MIDI, you can't play between notes (barring MPE, which itself is a hack and not supported in all DAWs), and - combined with the latency problems above - it means *both* your traditional instrument (ie Guitar) and digital interfaced (MIDI) will have weird latency issues. AI is not the solution and there's more than one problem. There are a few things which could help: * MIDI 2.0 / OSC / Literally anything with more resolution * Designing with more than just western music theory in mind (microtonal, swing/complex grooves, etc.) * A standardized framework for UI I think VCV rack [7], albeit it absolutely isn't a general purpose DAW, does a good job of addressing many of these issues, but it can't handle more basic use cases either. Sequencing a long track in it is like pulling teeth and performance is quite bad due to processing everything as float's sample-by-sample, not as a buffer. I do have some hope that change is coming. The Blockhead DAW [8] rightly has many musicians following this space excited for it's novel approach of treating audio in the timeline as a much more fluid source for quick modification rather than baked content you have to modify elsewhere. There is, ultimately, an incredible amount of complexity that music software has to account for. I could muse(score) about why this is the case: it could audio having a temporal element, unlike a text editor or maybe just the inherit complexities that arise from trying to create with a medium where you have to consider such an extreme amount of information that caries with it cultural context and an ease of offense to the senses that no other medium suffers (Bad audio is much less tolerable than bad video). No matter the case, it means that a DAW and the interacting with it needs to be very tightly integrated and intentionally designed with good standards while also being highly flexible. We nailed the flexibility, but totally dropped the ball on intentional design and standards that work for us. I don't think that can be un-done now, not without throwing away support for legitimately amazing tools. While I'm risking going pure-tangent, I also want to mention that there being no good method for hardware acceleration is a limiting factor in the audio world, along with better standards for UI and data transport, we're in desperate need of an open hardware acceleration standard that's easy to use and not crazy expensive. I should be able to throw in a DSP card just like I can throw in a big GPU and have enough umpf in my system not be constantly worrying about freezing tracks or having audio underruns. This is an extra reason for having as much hardware as I do: A lot of DSP distortions eat CPU and sound really bad. [0] https://opguides.info/music/midi/ https://opguides.info/music/midi/ [1] https://opguides.info/other/hci2/intro/ https://opguides.info/other/hci2/intro/ [2] https://opguides.info/music/instruments/#expressiveness-and-control https://opguides.info/music/instruments/#expressiveness-and-... [3] https://opguides.info/posts/aiartpanic/ https://opguides.info/posts/aiartpanic/ [4] https://opguides.info/posts/ai2/ https://opguides.info/posts/ai2/ [5] https://opguides.info/music/software/daw/ https://opguides.info/music/software/daw/ [6] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zpq7g9CcGv4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zpq7g9CcGv4 [7] https://vcvrack.com https://vcvrack.com [8] https://twitter.com/ColugoMusic https://twitter.com/ColugoMusic
ThinkBeat 3y ago
I strongly prefer a DAW that I can run locally without an internet connection. For me the most natural way to incorporate AI would be as "ai people" that have particular skills. "Master producer Eric" "Loop maker Ryan" "Guitarist Wendy" You can interact with them in much the same way as human session musician, producer, synth programming etc.
raffraffraff 3y ago
Ooh, this is an interesting set of comments. I'm currently trying to turn a really old Midimam Keystation 61 into a toy synth for my 3x 10 year old nephews (triplets). I'm using a spare Raspberry pi 4 so it's all gonna be Linux based. But I actually want to make it completely headless because DAWs are too complex and, IMHO, get between the person and the noises they're making. My goal is to hook up a Korg nanoKONTROL2 and use it as the only extra "surface" between the kid and the music. I'm at the very early stages of it right now but I can choose one of 16 midi channels, hit a key and make a noise. I haven't actually done anything with the nano.
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
  I use an RPi4 as the sound generator for the fully weighted 88 key controller my wife plays at home. It runs just one synth - the proprietary physical modelling synth Pianoteq, available for linux, windows, macOS, x86_64 and ARM. It does have a 10" touch screen because the synth has parameters worth controlling (e.g. what piano model). No DAW complexity, but I don't see why you'd ever get a DAW involved with "a toy synth for my 3x 10 year old nephews". It was a little tricky to get the sdcard set up initially, but since I did, it's just power-on-and-play-it.
  - raffraffraff 3y ago
    I think that kids might be interested in more than just a piano, so I wanted to use something like zyn with 16 hand-picked instruments. The nanoKONTROL2 has buttons to play/record/stop, and 8 separate control sections, each with a slider, rotating knob and 3x buttons. I could use them to record into separate tracks and play back solo or together. I just don't know if it's possible to make that usable without a display. That's what I'll be experimenting with. I know that the synth can operate as a VST inside a DAW (eg Ardour) and that many DAWs can run headless (eh hardour) so it may be possible to do this without a mouse, keyboard and screen. The nanoKONTROL2 has LEDs that can be used to indicate status etc.
helpfulContrib 3y ago
The Future of the DAW is DAW-less. A Synthstrom Deluge, a humble Eurorack (morphagene!) and a microFreak .. A Zynthian! Holy molies, live Zynthian compositions are binoculars! 1010music Bluebox+Blackbox. SonicWARE SmplTek. Monome. Oh dear, monome is a hell of a platform for next-generation DAW tomfoolery! Notice a pattern? Its the hardware. You can no longer call it a workstation when, after all, it behaves like an instrument.
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
  Let us know about the utility of those (excellent) tools for: * a four part acapella group * a traditional western european orchestra * someone who wants a recording of the call to prayer * anyone who needs to make a recording of anything at all? The original purpose of DAWs like ProTools was recording, editing and mixing. Composition and instrumental performance crept in later. Even if that aspect were to be completely replaced by hardware (possible, but unlikely), it would leave the original DAW functionality just as in in demand.
  - helpfulContrib 3y ago
    >* a four part acapella group Yes, that'd be a microphone setup per singer, probably, or at least two channels of audio. >* a traditional western european orchestra Yes, tons more channels .. >* someone who wants a recording of the call to prayer Only one channel needed really, but could be multiple if warranted. >* anyone who needs to make a recording of anything at all? As a professional designer of recording devices, I can tell where you are going - not that you might have missed the notion that there is literally no reason that a DAW-like instrument cannot be multi-channel capable - but also that portability to any environment is key. Physicality is the new frontier for digital capture. Recording/editing/mixing no longer belong in the workstation. Portable instrument-like DAW's, with extraordinary new and interesting interfaces to accomplish those goals you've set (although they are all basically the same thing), are already on the market. For example, the 1010Music Bluebox, alone, can be applied to any of those scenarios. Just add microphones (and USB powerbank...) Incidentally, PaulDavis: acknowledging your position as the originator/BDFL of the ARDOUR workstation software, I mean no disrespect for your stature and point of view -- just that I believe era of the DAW-less approach is upon us, and there is a rather large opportunity for device-makers, such as me, and software-makers, such as you, to align ourselves... The workstation is dead. The kids want portability, reliability, and power. This can all be done on non-standard operating systems, in a bespoke case, for fun and profit.
randomcarbloke 3y ago
I want more standalone daws integrated into pianos like the key 61, I resent needing a computer to select my instrument or arrange my sequencer.
dusted 3y ago
> DAWs are built on legacy code that can’t easily be pivoted as user expectation adjusts, As opposed to "non-legacy" code which is obviously malleable and easily adjustable to whatever new user expectation may arise?

196 points by sowbug 3y ago

If anyone else is as frustrated as I was with the article mentioning “the DAW” 73 times without defining once what the actual acronym stands for, it’s “Digital Audio Workstation”.

karmakaze 3y ago
I wasn't in this instance, but am in general. For industry folks they probably don't even realize it's not a word--surprised it hasn't lowercased to daw by now /s.
vladsanchez 3y ago
+1 Feels like they don't care who's their readership. Felt like they told me: "If you're not in the industry, Google it." DAW : Digital Audio Workstation https://www.masterclass.com/articles/what-is-a-daw https://www.masterclass.com/articles/what-is-a-daw
- capableweb 3y ago
  > +1 Feels like they don't care who's their readership. Felt like they told me: "If you're not in the industry, Google it." Caring about their readership is exactly what they're doing, just that you happen to not be what they think of when they imagine the typical reader. The typical reader is already into music production and with a 99% certainty know what a DAW is. I wouldn't expect every tutorial on "Google's Official Android Developer Blog" to explain that "JVM" means Java Virtual Machine, some resources really are for people who already know a bit about the subject area.
_joel 3y ago
DJ mag aint what it used to be. The top 100 is pretty much a joke to most people who care about music.
- tomduncalf 3y ago
  Yeah the top 100 is super weird, it’s all these commercial EDM DJs but the weird thing is the magazine doesn’t otherwise really seem to target that audience. I don’t read it but I have come across some good long form pieces like this from them online, so actually I think they are trying to do some good stuff.
  - DevoidSimo 3y ago
    I'd imagine that it's because the DJs ask people to vote for them. A lot of the DJs I follow do that every year. If the big commercial DJs with the biggest following do that, then they would naturally land at the top.
    - tomduncalf 3y ago
      Yeah I guess what I mean is that it seems to go against the rest of their brand, the magazine usually covers slightly more underground dance music it seems - not super underground, still big names, but not stadium EDM stuff. Maybe their philosophy is that the Top 100 should be an open thing and they shouldn't restrict who can enter based on music style... to me, it makes DJ Mag way less credible, but I guess they probably make money out of the Top 100 being so big.
cauthon 3y ago
In the same way I don’t expect a biologist writing for biologists to explain “DNA” stands for “deoxyribonucleic acid”, it’s probably not necessary for a music producer writing for producers and engineers to define “DAW”. Users here probably feel the same way about HTML, FIFO, DAG, etc
BigElephant 3y ago
No. The main audience for this article already know what a DAW is
KingEllis 3y ago
100 percent
bwanab 3y ago
The fact that the article was in DJMag might have been a clue?
dist-epoch 3y ago
Defining DAW is like defining SQL. If you need the definition, you are definitely not the target audience.
thr0waway001 3y ago
D'OH!!!
xcv123 3y ago
[dead]
RockRobotRock 3y ago
In the time it took you to Ctrl+F DAW you could have googled it.

_joel 3y ago

The Logic screenshot with "Untitled" is triggering me.

PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago

TFA starts down an important path - identifying different categories of users - but doesn't really get this quite right IMO. There are (at least) four categories of DAW users: 1. Professionals who are being paid to make music, and for whom time is essentially money. Tools that speed up the production of that music are both financially valuable to them, and also make their overall lives easier (if done right). 2. Musicians for whom making music is a creative act of self-expression. They are not being paid by the hour (of music, or of effort), they are not under deadlines, but they do want tools that fit their own workflow and understanding of what the process should look like. 3. People who just want to have fun making music. Their level of performance virtuosity is likely low, and the originality of what they produce is likely to be judged by most music fans to be low. They want results that can be quickly obtained and are recognizable musical in whatever style they are aiming at, and they don't want to feel bogged down by the technology and process. 4. Audio engineers in a variety of fields who have little to no interest/need for music composition, but are faced with the task of taking a variety of audio data and transforming it radically or subtly to create the finished version, whether that's a collection of musical compositions or a podcast or a move soundtrack. The same individual may, at different times, be a member of more than one of these groups (or other groups that I've omitted). The needs of each of these groups overlap to a degree, but specifically the extent to which the current conception of AI in music&audio can help them, and how it may do so, are really quite different. We can already see this in the current DAW world, where the set of users of DAWs like Live, Bitwig and FL Studio tends to be somewhat disjoint from the users of ProTools, Logic and Studio One. TFA acknowledges this to some degree, but I don't think it does enough to recognize the different needs of these groups/workflows. Nevertheless, not a bad overview of the challenges/possibilities that we're facing.

thegagne 3y ago
Any recommendations for #3? Particularly with low barrier of entry for kids? Something you can use a midi keyboard and a mic with?
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
  Sadly, its the group I pay the least attention to. I suspect that today or next week, something browser based might be the best choice, but I can't tell you what. Apologies.

BryanLegend 3y ago

I too have been wondering what the future is for the Detroit Auto Workers....

roblh 3y ago

DAW version control is one of my dreams. If I could have a really tight git equivalent for reaper projects, it’d be so cool. Plugins are, as usual, the biggest barrier there. Doesn’t seem like there will ever be a good way to deal with different people having completely different plugin collections. Unless someone makes “Netflix but for plugins” or something. The other thing I saw the other day that I thought was cool was a reverb plugin that uses your GPU. Seems like the next step for modeling could easily be in that direction. Especially since the bar there is low, pretty much just the positively ancient UAD hardware acceleration cards, although UAD themselves seem to be going the opposite way and pushing native stuff now.

eternityforest 3y ago
In the open source world, a DAW could really just include everything. You'd still need plugins occasionally, but I don't see why there couldn't be a curated collection that covers all the basics.
dleeftink 3y ago
Re: point 1, I feel you! Any chance you have checked out Splice or other rent-to-own plugin providers? It's not quite Netflixy, but less steep compared to upfront VST purchases. [0]: https://splice.com/plugins/rent-to-own https://splice.com/plugins/rent-to-own
kid64 3y ago
Sounds like you're talking about both version control and project portability, which are different concerns. But with respect to version control, many systems like Cubase use XML project files. As long as you don't physically delete any audio from your disk, basic version control on your machine using git should be possible.
- roblh 3y ago
  It’s true that you can dump a project into a git repo, but the real problem is diffing. It would be pretty miserable trying to reconcile any significant changes or conflicts. What I think would be cool is a tool for auditioning and merging specific changes that’s backed by git somehow. I’m not really sure what it would look like though.

dleeftink 3y ago

What is the future of the rotary phone? The typewriter? The floppy disc? None of these have dissolved completely; the rotary dial, the keyboard layout, the swappable storage medium still exist, especially in music production hardware. It just takes a company like Bitwig to come along and show how else these pre-existing interfaces can be modularised and combined, and some iterations of the Push controller[0] to uppend the traditional fingering required to play them. [0]: https://www.ableton.com/en/push/ https://www.ableton.com/en/push/

CrypticShift 3y ago

Despite (or maybe because of) following this space for more than 20 years, I would love a (good) book on the inner (recent) history of the music software industry (= DAWs/plugins). I fail to find even one book on the subject. Anyone ? There is this quote : "To know your future, you must know your past". I agree the cloud/AI combo is revolutionary, but we also need to dig a little deeper into the past to understand what is coming.

eunoia 3y ago
Very much agreed! If anyone knows of a good one I would love to read it as well.

bandrami 3y ago

I'm still getting used to the "new" scene-based model (which is I guess actually pretty old at this point) but it seems mostly unavoidable now that Ardour has switched to it in v7. Though I also think there's a lot of space on the low end of simple sequencers that the tracker renaissance is starting to fill.

PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
We haven't "switched to it" - it's an addition, not a replacement. ProTools just announced their version too. And yes, this model is roughly 20 years at this point (Ableton Live started at about the same as Ardour).
- bandrami 3y ago
  Sorry, "switch" was the wrong word there, and I absolutely love the clip launcher. It's just kind of like the difference between editing text in a dumb editor vs an IDE or something like slime; lowering the "cost" of trying stuff absolutely changes how you think about your music and what you do with it.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
    As long as your music is "in the box", yes. If you're a classical oud player, not so much.

gizajob 3y ago

I wish someone would have put a bullet in Pro Tools two decades ago…

robenkleene 3y ago

The umbrella topic to this is one of my favorite topics in all of software and one where strangely we as an industry don't seem to have internalized its lessons: That the right approach to building a software program (like a DAW, NLE, bitmap/vector editor) emerges early. This is why these applications have lifespans measured in decades, and it's extremely rare for a new player to be able offer anything new, different, and valuable because the design space has already been solved for the problems these applications are solving. I wrote a piece on this subject, e.g., why, how, when software transitions do happen for these kinds of apps: https://blog.robenkleene.com/2023/06/19/software-transitions-the-five-year-rule/ https://blog.robenkleene.com/2023/06/19/software-transitions...

PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
I don't think this is true at all. For several different reasons: First, "the right approach" to building a software program is wildly unspecified: it could refer to the UI/UX aspects and/or the internal design, and these both have dramatic impacts on long term evolution. Second: the "right approach" for "making music" in the early days covered things as distinct as MIDI sequencers, trackers and early ProTools. It was far from obvious whether all 3 would continue to exist or some hybrid would become dominant (that's actually what happened - early ProTools did not do MIDI; the eventually archetype for DAWs turned out to be a blend of ProTools and MIDI sequencers, and trackers were discarded). Third: As I alluded to in my comment here about user groups, the right approach is going to differ for different workflows and use cases. FL Studio is not used by many audio mastering engineers; ProTools is not the choice of beat producers. Fourth: the goalposts keep moving with increasing compute power. The current idea of infinitely elastic audio that has become common among the most popular DAWs would have been unachievable in the early 2000s. Network bandwidth may have a similar impact. Fifth: the right approach (especially visible today) for some people who are generally "in DAW space" isn't a DAW at all, but hardware designs that bypass most of the functionality associated with traditional DAW design. The Elektron and similar h/w sequencers of the last 5 years are in some senses closer to plugins than they are to DAWs. Sixth: plugins - the ones associated with compositional elements (you could say sequencers but it goes beyond that) - have long been where the innovation has been taking place. These have evolved quite differently and more diversely than the DAWs that host them. For many users, plugins are the real workhorses and the DAWs are just the scaffolding around that. It would be hard to take a look at compositional plugins and conclude that the "right approach" emerged early.

te_chris 3y ago

How can you write this article only interviewing a bunch of startups? Tim Exile is a very interesting and visionary dude, but without serious contributions from Ableton or Apple on the DAW side this article feels a bit listless - none of these others are real players in the space.

PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
You might want to consider what that sounds like if you rewind it to say, 2002. Ableton is a small startup in Berlin. The dominant DAWs include several that don't even do MIDI. Apple hasn't yet acquired Logic by buying Emagic. Why would expect the next steps to come from "real players in the space", when the previous next steps did not? Look at how quickly Presonus managed to build Studio One to a crazy-level of credibility (it helps that they hired someone who had already done it twice).
- te_chris 3y ago
  Because it’s not 2002? As you say, music production capable workstations didn’t really exist. To count out extremely capable incumbents in favour of reporting the opinions of bandlab who bought Cakewalk in a fire sale and haven’t really had much of a dent from what I can tell seems strange. No solid quotes from presonus either.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
    > As you say, music production capable workstations didn’t really exist. Didn't say that. They absolutely did! It took a small startup in Berlin to introduce the idea that maybe everything should be tied to the groove, always. That was not 100% revolutionary (Acid could do some of that), but it upended computer-based music production entirely. The incumbents are very, very unlikely to have access to people with a deep/serious interest in "AI & music" technology (maybe Apple?). Startups in this space are started by those people.
  - xcv123 3y ago
    > To count out extremely capable incumbents The article mentions those "extremely capable incumbents" are now stuck with legacy codebases. > music production capable workstations didn’t really exist Logic and Cubase were highly capable in 2002. They haven't progressed much in 20 years. The midi drum track editor in Cubase today looks the same as the 90s version.

matjus 3y ago

DAWs will need to refocus on managing recordings of live performances -- young kids are starting guitar bands again, and in a few years I think we will enter yet another period where electronic sounds are out of fashion. I'd also like to see more music creation nuts & bolts built into DAWs, like integrated lyrics, a quick way to shuffle pieces of a song like "bridge" and "verse", visualizations of key center shifts, chord builders and so on. A lot of that stuff is out there but it's definitely an afterthought.

Stinky_Lisa 3y ago
PreSonus Studio One has what you're describing. Im switching from logic pro to a new DAW and so far studio one has the most of my boxes checked.
- ta988 3y ago
  What does it do that you prefer?
  - Stinky_Lisa 3y ago
    It runs on window, is not a subscription service, has a lot functions that I'm used to and has a lot of automated workflow possibilities. Theres a lot more it can do then I'm able to mention but here are some of the cool traits that stood out for me. It can group a chord progression and create a variety for multiple tracks without getting into the midi editor. Additionally, I can globally save those chords and use them down the line in any other project easily. Theres a lyrics function too where I can run parallel to a vocal track so the vocalist can pick up exactly where they need to and see what's coming. I've done a few demo projects and I really like it so far.
spacemadness 3y ago
I have wondered when the backlash, or maybe a sidelash, would start tasking place. I’ve been into many forms of electronic music and production since the 90s and right now if I was in my youth I might reach again for my guitar. Even though there is a lot of amazing stuff being produced that is not commercial/festival bound, there is a lot of money in EDM, probably too much, that would seem to push many people in the opposite direction away from the corporate driven machine.

barkingcat 3y ago

DAW innovation will only come with inventing new algorithms. There needs to be significant number theory and computer science algorithmic work related to sound and how we represent sound with data. GPU's currently cannot work with sound data in the processing chain, and multicore is basically just used to scale horizontally (ie to have more plugins or instruments) New algorithms are needed to scale out audio processing, as well as make use of new hardware types (for example, using the gpu)

jrajav 3y ago
You seem to think DAW makers don't already specialize a ton in DSP, algorithms, and concurrency - I can assure you that that's definitely the case, and that innovation and optimization happen at a very healthy pace. There is significant market pressure to run tracks and plugins in a highly optimized way. Several DAWs have a visible CPU-usage meter, and some allow users to directly configure a process isolation model for plugins. However, audio has a very different set of constraints from other types of workloads - the hallmarks being one worker doing LOTS of number crunching on a SINGLE stream of floating-point numbers (well, two streams, for stereo), that processing necessarily happening in SERIAL, and getting the results back INSTANTLY. Why serial? Because for most nontrivial audio processing algorithms, the results depend on not just the previous sample, or even chunk of samples, but are often a rolling algorithm that depends on a very long history of prior samples. Why instantly? Because plugins need to be able to run in realtime for production and auditioning, so every processing block has a very tight budget of tens of milliseconds to do all its work, and some of them make use of a lot of that budget. Also, all of these constraints apply across an entire track as well - every plugin on a track has to apply in serial, one at a time, and they need to share memory and act on the same block of audio. One thing you might notice is these constraints are pretty bad conditions for GPU work. You're not the first to think of trying that - it's just not a great fit for most kinds of audio processing. There are some algorithms that can run massively parallel and independent, but they're outliers. Horizontally scaling different tracks across CPUs, however, works splendidly.
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
  To be fair, some of the things currently piquing people's interest are suitable for offline "massively parallel" processing ala GPUs. Source separation and timbral transfer would be the first two that come to mind.

_9hey 3y ago

A DAW is an all-in-one tool for composing, recording, arranging, mixing, and more. There are several factors that make this coupling necessary - the high performance requirements of DSP, the lack of better standards, and subject matter expertise. To innovate in the space, we need an ecosystem of interoperable tools which can be used seamlessly to perform the same tasks reliably. I think of the paradigm shift between apache http server and nodejs. Does the server run the code or does the code run the server? If DAWs switched to the nodejs model, what would be the entry point?

chaosprint 3y ago

I have been doing live coding for a while, but DAW is still important to me. I recently bought a Arturia keyboard in order to make some Trap and pop songs, and I immediately realised how important a seamless experience is between the DAW software and hardware. That kind of experience can't be replaced by AI. I am sure if Arturia makes a DAW, it would be a great one.

helloplanets 3y ago

I could see this opening up a new way to generate ideas from which you can start building, or what to add/remove when you're stumped. Maybe a way to create coherent arrangements from a curated list of one shot samples and short loops. And I wouldn't be surprised at all if the automated mixing/mastering services (of which there has been a bunch for years) take a giant leap forward because of better technology. But in general I'd imagine written language to be a pretty infuriating tool for describing what you want musically, when the most interesting parts of music are just about always the ones that you can't really capture with language. You can kind of outline things with written language and traditional music theory, but it's usually just a blurry version of why a specific piece of music resonates. I think that AI tools for music will most likely just stay as plugins within the more traditional DAW structure. There's only so many ways to represent an audio file, and a fader that controls the volume of a track or some other parameter. Like mentioned in the article, most of these additions take quite a bit away from the amount of control the artist has over the music, and lowering the amount of 'input resolution' in this sense is a block that's almost impossible to overcome.

BandButcher 3y ago
Agree with the text input being annoying and possibly more of an impedance. Personally i would prefer to speak out the sound i want (think beat boxing noises) and then have the generative ai give me an array of similar sounds and then i can just drag and drop where i want it Writing into a prompt feels opposite to the creative process but as a first pass its a cool tool, kudos
- meowface 3y ago
  You can kind of do something like this with the Vochlea microphone and their corresponding software: https://vochlea.com https://vochlea.com I don't think it's combined with AI yet, but I have to imagine it's on the horizon. At the moment it basically just MIDI-fies your voice. You can raise or lower your voice pitch to turn a parameter knob, beat box to lay down percussion notes, etc.

RecycledEle 3y ago

DAW = Digital Audio Workstation. I expect the future of the DAW is a Xeon-powered machine from Dell or HP with Adobe Creative Cloud (CC.)

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smetj 3y ago

DAWs just dont handle the jamming part very well ... Rythm generation, patterns, manual real time tweaking of sound and rythm ...

squarefoot 3y ago

What I really miss in DAWs is a drum arranging tool that goes beyond scores or xoxo grids. Those are good for editing patterns in atomic ways, but I'd love something to quickly record new patterns played on drum pads on the fly, with arbitrary duration, create a new pattern that inherits parts of the one I just recorded (to make variations and fills) just by hitting one key and/or sending a MIDI note from a controller, etc. Then after having a good number of patterns, I'd like something that shows them as nodes on screen so that they can be connected dynamically according to a predefined flow with possible variations triggered by MIDI notes (pedal switches) during live performances so that the flow can be altered either by prolonging/shortening a series of patterns, jumping here and there based on conditions, but the visual node representation would be vital to have a quick feedback that shows what is going to happen say 5 measures from now, for example by highlighting the nodes and flow that will be followed under the present conditions.

bandrami 3y ago
Have you ever looked at Non? It has a recording mode that is a lot like what you described if I understand you right. Development is kind of moribund but that can be an advantage in some ways.
- squarefoot 3y ago
  Unfortunately it requires Jack, which for me has always been a source of frustration. I can get very low latencies and excellent stability using Alsa alone, so don't feel the need to change. Unfortunately as much as Jack is incredibly powerful, its UI to organize and connect stuff together is an example of how terrible usability choices can ruin an otherwise great software.
  - bandrami 3y ago
    It works fine on pipewire's jack emulation, which is much less of a headache
mxmilkiib 3y ago
Maybe https://github.com/ahlstromcj/seq66 https://github.com/ahlstromcj/seq66? Spiritual successor of seq24.

luckyt 3y ago

It would be great to see more innovation like AI in DAW tools, but there are some challenges. The main constraint is it needs to process in real time, allowing just a few ms to process a sample. Very few neural methods can work with that constraint, without it, they can't fit into the standard DAW workflow where you string together many plugins, each processing the signal in real time. There are some AI tools that work outside the main workflow, like for mastering after you're done with the DAW. But it's quite difficult to improve and bring new ideas beyond the typical signal processing modules without completely revamping the current workflow.

flipcoder 3y ago

I can see VSTs being replaced with AI that will create instrument sounds or effects based on description text

recursive 3y ago
That's just another VST with a different UI.

rcarmo 3y ago

No mention of Bitwig, which just keeps adding new features and modularity.

sowbug 3y ago
No mention of Bitwig, which just keeps adding new features and modularity. Bitwig is mentioned three times in the article. That said, I don't think the article author would consider Bitwig to be substantially novel compared to the other mainstream DAWs that inspired the sentiment behind the article.
IAmGraydon 3y ago
I want to love Bitwig, but the UI needs serious work as does compatibility with external controllers like the Novation Launchpad (which is what I sequence all of my music through). I’m hoping the next release addresses both of these.

pdntspa 3y ago

To be honest, I really like existing tools and workflows and I don't really want that to change. > Open a DAW from the year 2000 and it’s highly likely you’ll recognise the vast majority of the features — both functionally and visually — from any DAW you might use today. This assertion that "old is bad" really, really needs to die. Change for the sake of change is bad. I don't see why all these new innovations can't be baked into existing workflows in a natural and intuitive fashion. But then, in some cases, do I really want them? Like generative AI for music. I'm not sure but leaning towards no.

matchagaucho 3y ago
I like the existing workflows. But I'd really love to GPT-define reverb settings, song forms, channel inputs, ... tedious copy-paste tasks. A local LLM running on x86 or M2 would be great. But API callouts while waiting for the silicon/Cuda migrations are fine too.
- plussed_reader 3y ago
  Nothing will homogenize pop like LLM inspired filters; the new presets of the dx7.
  - wormius 3y ago
    But that bass is so classic and tight!
    - plussed_reader 3y ago
      Don't you worry; Daniel E. and the streaming cartels will happily plug something like that into your sound hole.
8f2ab37a-ed6c 3y ago
Having started music production only in the late 2010s, I was honestly shocked to see just how similar DAWs from even the 90s were to the current existing workflows. It feels like you could teleport a producer from a few decades ago into the modern day music software iteration and they would figure things out pretty quickly. Of course things are far, far more convenient and faster nowadays, but the fundamental paradigms are mostly the same. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6OaBkvwx7Hw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6OaBkvwx7Hw

jrm4 3y ago

Feels like "what is the future of the word processor" but with some weird expectation that you're expecting to see leaps and bounds. Look, FWIW, my favorite music making "stack" is - Fruityloops (as in, sure I'll use FL Studio but it was pretty much solid for me when it was called that) - Sony ACID. Still unbeatable to me for quickly layering/previewing multiple tracks of loops - Cool Edit Pro/Adobe Audition. Still much nicer than Audacity. I don't know why Audacity remains so popular, it's way clunkier than the above Ableton/Bitwig are also fun to play with and I could see them being indispensable for some, but what more do people need that you couldn't theoretically get "incrementally" or "with plugins?"

tomduncalf 3y ago
> I don't know why Audacity remains so popular, it's way clunkier than the above Presumably because it’s free, but I’m with you on the clunkiness. The UI looks very dated. I can recommend OcenAudio, which is free though not open source, and for me offers just the right level of functionality in a clean user interface. It’s very similar to how I remember the old versions of Cool Edit pre-Pro, which I thought were amazing bits of software.
- MrVandemar 3y ago
  > The UI looks very dated. If the UI is clunky to use, that's something that needs to be fixed. If the UI works okay, but only looks dated, that's ... fine and there's every good reason to leave it as it is. Why? Because altering the look of the UI is strongly coupled with altering the usability of the UI. This leads to regressions in usability, making the product "look better" but "work worse". Leave things alone. I don't care if the UI looks like Motif or TCL or a TUI, but if it works in a smooth, intuitive and pleasing way, there's no reason to change it. The VIM interface is the very definition of "extremely dated", and that's fine.
  - jrm4 3y ago
    Yeah, I didn't just mean in looks though; e.g. Audition and Ocenaudio behave more like, e.g. a normal text box or other "editing space in a computer." Cutting/Pasting/Trimming etc are easier and more intuitive, with fewer clicks and less thinking about tracks and such.

Venn1 3y ago

I've been using Reaper as a digital mixer for live streams and recording podcasts. Great way to set up virtual channel strips for everyone and do proper mix-minus so we don't have to rely on software echo cancelation. Works a treat with netjack2 on Linux.

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bentt 3y ago

In some ways, this is like saying "What Is the Future of the Piano?"

zerbinxx 3y ago
True - but there’s been a ton of stylistic and technological advancement of the basic 88 key device over the years - ranging from the development of key synths to (neo)classical reimaginings of how to use the hammers and strings to do something novel, not to mention AFX going nuts with little servos and player pianos, plus the development of jazz, ragtime, etc.

robust-cactus 3y ago

The only thing I want out of some of these tools is either teaching or giving me out of the box configurations that help me get a reallllly good mix. Why shouldn't every record today sound pro? Talent aside, I think they should be implementing some the typical tricks sound engineers/producers use automatically. I mean we're really talking about wave analysis then cutting of frequencies, boosting others. This can be automated based on a desired "genre/sound".

ta988 3y ago
There is quite a bit more to it, distributing sound in time frequency and space, sidechain effects that apply changes on some tracks depending on the sound of other tracks (one super common example is to silence slightly instruments to leave room in volume and frequency for a kick or drums in general). Frequency splitting, parallel fx chains. It is a bit tricky to automate and is really based on a feeling as each person doing the mixing will have a different vision and experience, and every song will have a different frequency/space/time complexity even in the same genre. But most advanced DAWs with integrated collection of effects like Live or Bitwig will have presets that you can start to build on. (I have not tried reaper for that, that's on my list)

extrn 3y ago

I’ve been working on a next gen DAW for a few years and this article misses all of my priorities. AI will encourage mindless replication; instead modern tooling should be analytical, precise, deliberate, flexible, and have layered complexity. My priorities are more in line with turning music production into an integrated and interactive development environment using modern design principles. Sub-modular capability, A/B testing, git integration, non-local collaboration, scientific visualization, notebook style experimentation, integrated synth build / play, web embedded optional interface, social sharing & tutorials, polyglot open source interface (primarily Rust), programmable behavior / macros, higher order signal dependency optimization, algorithmic mastering, targeted oversampling, creative process reusability, etc. You can solve the plugin issue by just synchronizing the output audio by the user that has it installed. Quality music production is an opague art and everything is way more daunting than it needs to be. Most producers just mess around until it sounds good and that gets people stuck in a local maximum of clarity. If it takes too long to experiment then you won’t get through the effort of trial for understanding. I have spent 15 years building tools as a research quant dev and also a dj (Extrn). There is a huge unaddressed gap in the audio space and huge barriers to entry in accessibility and cognitive burden.

p1nkpineapple 3y ago
Fascinating! Is there anywhere where we can follow development of this?
skwosh 3y ago
Spot on. It's telling that most DAW UIs are based on archaic ideas (like mixers/tracks and MIDI/step-sequencer grids). Even BuzzTracker (2009) outshines many of the current DAWs with DAG instrument/effects-chaining and arrow-key/cursor navigation. My post-graduate research concerned signal-rather-than-event-based generation/transformation of compositional data, integrated with textural/timbral synthesis. My current focus is building a DSP framework for this purpose in C++20 [1]. In any case I'm interested in following your progress, and happy to contribute code/ideas if you feel like collaborating (links in profile). [1] https://github.com/synthetic-methods/xtal https://github.com/synthetic-methods/xtal

vegadw 3y ago

I am a musician that mainly plays guitar and synths. I have a large eurorack, have tried nearly every MPE compatible synth & controller, and have a massive pedal board. I am also an embedded software engineer and have made audio plugins for VCV Rack. I have written blog posts [0] about MIDI to try to explain it to a technical-ish audience. I have written many, many more posts about why the way we interact with computers is ... sub-optiminal [1] and why new controllers are making it better [2]. I've also written a post reflecting on how AI Art tools like Stable Diffusion have/will affect artists [3] [4]. On my site, I have a list of DAWs and a simple Pro/Con view of each [5]. I have reviewed Emergent Drums, an AI drum-sample tool (and gave it a poor rating) [6] All of that credential waving is to say, I think about this a lot. The software workflow is so bad that I have resorted to buying an insane amount of hardware, so, what makes it so bad? * Latency correction hell. - Only an issue for musicians not working entirely digitally * Limited I/O (albeit this wouldn't be an issue if I could get away with using less hardware) - You can't use more than 1 audio interface at a time in Windows * Interface navigation hell - VSTs all load as individual windows - There's often still issues with DPI scaling * DRM hell on those virtual instruments * Software stability hell - Not all DAWs sandbox plugins * Complex routings are often complicated - In audio-contexts, we often want to pipe signal around in branching - diverging & merging - paths, often with signals from unrelated chains changing things (ex: sidechain compression from a bass drum) But I can almost forgive all of those issues. The real issue is and will continue to be MIDI. * 127 values for knobs? Really? That's quantization you can hear. * No good support for microtonal - Current hacks often break down realllllly bad with big scale. If you're in 31EDO, for example, you only get 4 octaves of range. * Clocking is a disaster, making swing, polyrhythms, etc. more of a mess than they need be. Those are issues that legitimately limit the expressiveness of all music creation. You can't fine-tune a value in MIDI, you can't play between notes (barring MPE, which itself is a hack and not supported in all DAWs), and - combined with the latency problems above - it means *both* your traditional instrument (ie Guitar) and digital interfaced (MIDI) will have weird latency issues. AI is not the solution and there's more than one problem. There are a few things which could help: * MIDI 2.0 / OSC / Literally anything with more resolution * Designing with more than just western music theory in mind (microtonal, swing/complex grooves, etc.) * A standardized framework for UI I think VCV rack [7], albeit it absolutely isn't a general purpose DAW, does a good job of addressing many of these issues, but it can't handle more basic use cases either. Sequencing a long track in it is like pulling teeth and performance is quite bad due to processing everything as float's sample-by-sample, not as a buffer. I do have some hope that change is coming. The Blockhead DAW [8] rightly has many musicians following this space excited for it's novel approach of treating audio in the timeline as a much more fluid source for quick modification rather than baked content you have to modify elsewhere. There is, ultimately, an incredible amount of complexity that music software has to account for. I could muse(score) about why this is the case: it could audio having a temporal element, unlike a text editor or maybe just the inherit complexities that arise from trying to create with a medium where you have to consider such an extreme amount of information that caries with it cultural context and an ease of offense to the senses that no other medium suffers (Bad audio is much less tolerable than bad video). No matter the case, it means that a DAW and the interacting with it needs to be very tightly integrated and intentionally designed with good standards while also being highly flexible. We nailed the flexibility, but totally dropped the ball on intentional design and standards that work for us. I don't think that can be un-done now, not without throwing away support for legitimately amazing tools. While I'm risking going pure-tangent, I also want to mention that there being no good method for hardware acceleration is a limiting factor in the audio world, along with better standards for UI and data transport, we're in desperate need of an open hardware acceleration standard that's easy to use and not crazy expensive. I should be able to throw in a DSP card just like I can throw in a big GPU and have enough umpf in my system not be constantly worrying about freezing tracks or having audio underruns. This is an extra reason for having as much hardware as I do: A lot of DSP distortions eat CPU and sound really bad. [0] https://opguides.info/music/midi/ https://opguides.info/music/midi/ [1] https://opguides.info/other/hci2/intro/ https://opguides.info/other/hci2/intro/ [2] https://opguides.info/music/instruments/#expressiveness-and-control https://opguides.info/music/instruments/#expressiveness-and-... [3] https://opguides.info/posts/aiartpanic/ https://opguides.info/posts/aiartpanic/ [4] https://opguides.info/posts/ai2/ https://opguides.info/posts/ai2/ [5] https://opguides.info/music/software/daw/ https://opguides.info/music/software/daw/ [6] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zpq7g9CcGv4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zpq7g9CcGv4 [7] https://vcvrack.com https://vcvrack.com [8] https://twitter.com/ColugoMusic https://twitter.com/ColugoMusic

ThinkBeat 3y ago

I strongly prefer a DAW that I can run locally without an internet connection. For me the most natural way to incorporate AI would be as "ai people" that have particular skills. "Master producer Eric" "Loop maker Ryan" "Guitarist Wendy" You can interact with them in much the same way as human session musician, producer, synth programming etc.

raffraffraff 3y ago

Ooh, this is an interesting set of comments. I'm currently trying to turn a really old Midimam Keystation 61 into a toy synth for my 3x 10 year old nephews (triplets). I'm using a spare Raspberry pi 4 so it's all gonna be Linux based. But I actually want to make it completely headless because DAWs are too complex and, IMHO, get between the person and the noises they're making. My goal is to hook up a Korg nanoKONTROL2 and use it as the only extra "surface" between the kid and the music. I'm at the very early stages of it right now but I can choose one of 16 midi channels, hit a key and make a noise. I haven't actually done anything with the nano.

PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
I use an RPi4 as the sound generator for the fully weighted 88 key controller my wife plays at home. It runs just one synth - the proprietary physical modelling synth Pianoteq, available for linux, windows, macOS, x86_64 and ARM. It does have a 10" touch screen because the synth has parameters worth controlling (e.g. what piano model). No DAW complexity, but I don't see why you'd ever get a DAW involved with "a toy synth for my 3x 10 year old nephews". It was a little tricky to get the sdcard set up initially, but since I did, it's just power-on-and-play-it.
- raffraffraff 3y ago
  I think that kids might be interested in more than just a piano, so I wanted to use something like zyn with 16 hand-picked instruments. The nanoKONTROL2 has buttons to play/record/stop, and 8 separate control sections, each with a slider, rotating knob and 3x buttons. I could use them to record into separate tracks and play back solo or together. I just don't know if it's possible to make that usable without a display. That's what I'll be experimenting with. I know that the synth can operate as a VST inside a DAW (eg Ardour) and that many DAWs can run headless (eh hardour) so it may be possible to do this without a mouse, keyboard and screen. The nanoKONTROL2 has LEDs that can be used to indicate status etc.

helpfulContrib 3y ago

The Future of the DAW is DAW-less. A Synthstrom Deluge, a humble Eurorack (morphagene!) and a microFreak .. A Zynthian! Holy molies, live Zynthian compositions are binoculars! 1010music Bluebox+Blackbox. SonicWARE SmplTek. Monome. Oh dear, monome is a hell of a platform for next-generation DAW tomfoolery! Notice a pattern? Its the hardware. You can no longer call it a workstation when, after all, it behaves like an instrument.

PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
Let us know about the utility of those (excellent) tools for: * a four part acapella group * a traditional western european orchestra * someone who wants a recording of the call to prayer * anyone who needs to make a recording of anything at all? The original purpose of DAWs like ProTools was recording, editing and mixing. Composition and instrumental performance crept in later. Even if that aspect were to be completely replaced by hardware (possible, but unlikely), it would leave the original DAW functionality just as in in demand.
- helpfulContrib 3y ago
  >* a four part acapella group Yes, that'd be a microphone setup per singer, probably, or at least two channels of audio. >* a traditional western european orchestra Yes, tons more channels .. >* someone who wants a recording of the call to prayer Only one channel needed really, but could be multiple if warranted. >* anyone who needs to make a recording of anything at all? As a professional designer of recording devices, I can tell where you are going - not that you might have missed the notion that there is literally no reason that a DAW-like instrument cannot be multi-channel capable - but also that portability to any environment is key. Physicality is the new frontier for digital capture. Recording/editing/mixing no longer belong in the workstation. Portable instrument-like DAW's, with extraordinary new and interesting interfaces to accomplish those goals you've set (although they are all basically the same thing), are already on the market. For example, the 1010Music Bluebox, alone, can be applied to any of those scenarios. Just add microphones (and USB powerbank...) Incidentally, PaulDavis: acknowledging your position as the originator/BDFL of the ARDOUR workstation software, I mean no disrespect for your stature and point of view -- just that I believe era of the DAW-less approach is upon us, and there is a rather large opportunity for device-makers, such as me, and software-makers, such as you, to align ourselves... The workstation is dead. The kids want portability, reliability, and power. This can all be done on non-standard operating systems, in a bespoke case, for fun and profit.

randomcarbloke 3y ago

I want more standalone daws integrated into pianos like the key 61, I resent needing a computer to select my instrument or arrange my sequencer.

dusted 3y ago

> DAWs are built on legacy code that can’t easily be pivoted as user expectation adjusts, As opposed to "non-legacy" code which is obviously malleable and easily adjustable to whatever new user expectation may arise?