5 ms·

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

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
gnulinux 3y ago
Really??? Uh, it's probably my fault but as a hobbyist composer (day job software engineer) I can personally say that tools I use absolutely and utterly suck. They're immensely buggy. My workflow includes: - LilyPond for writing the final notation - MuseScore 4 for playing around, MuseScore 3 for playing MIDI - REAPER as DAW, SFZ plugin for midi soundfonts - Audacity for processing WAV files - music21 python lib if I need to programmatically process MIDI (which I commonly do). My scripts using this lib. - Kdenlive for video processing - Most importantly: my piano Roland FP-30X Now among these the only one I don't hate is FP-30X. That piano is fucking amazing, it sounds and feels great. Kdenlive is also not terrible but I don't do a lot of video processing. Just basic notation videos for YouTube. Everything else is incredibly, incredibly buggy. MuseScore 4 is thrash, almost every interaction I have with it exposes some bug. REAPER is usually fine but there are pretty annoying bugs when it comes to MIDI import/export that involves time signature change. My workflow is so dogshit that last month I decided either I'll write my minimalist tiny notation/DAW tool or reconsider this hobby. So far haven't been able to do anything major but I'm confident I'll invest some time into developing my own tools in late 2023 or early 2024. I'm glad people like their workflow. Unfortunately my own experience with Linux audio processing has been nothing other than encountering one bug after the other one. EDIT: Whoops, don't know why I said Ardour. I never used it, I actually meant REAPER. Fixed now.
- radlad 3y ago
  > Unfortunately my own experience with Linux audio processing has been nothing other than encountering one bug after the other one. You kind of buried the lede there...
  - twangist 3y ago
    "To the man who has only a hammer, everything looks like a nail." Imagine, expecting Linux to provide a productive, frictionless music creation workflow, using programs that aren't exactly torture-tested for usability on the platform. I think you're supposed to be grateful/amazed that they work at all. (Not that the UX would be dramatically better or trouble-free on Windows or a Mac, using the same suite of apps.)
- 3y ago
scarecrowbob 3y ago
More or less, this. I've worked in a lot of studios with 2" tape or, like Radar or an HD24. In all of those, the engineer had really great chops. Functionally, for most "traditional" (I do a lot of folk, jazz, and country) I just do what they did, and Logic is just a glorified tape machine + mixer + processing. I am still mostly doing stuff in single takes until I like what I have and then maybe punching in a note or two here and there. It's a really fast way of working. And the old stuff I have is quite good: API/Neve front end, AKG/Schoeps mics, genelecs.... these are all things that have been around a long time, and I am not seeing any benefits there for anything- they are fast and easy to use well without a lot of tweaking. Like, you could walk into any studio post 1980 and more or less find things will have a 1-1 correspondence to a modern DAW. There is nothing wrong with those tools, and so I assume folks will keep using them. However, I can see a couple of areas where I think that smarter tools might help. A big chunk of what I am doing already involves programmed drums, and a smarter "Drummer" in logic would be an improvement. Also I (and a lot of other folks) aren't super stoked about harmonies sung by one person overdubbing a bunch of lines. I'd be interested in some workflow where I could, like, sing a harmony and it would change my voice in a credible sounding way. But as far as workflow goes, I really don't need compositional tools- I could do most of my writing tasks with a pencil and notebook.
- imbnwa 3y ago
  >Also I (and a lot of other folks) aren't super stoked about harmonies sung by one person overdubbing a bunch of lines. I'd be interested in some workflow where I could, like, sing a harmony and it would change my voice in a credible sounding way. This would be a godsend
wazoox 3y ago
"Open a Word processor from the year 2000...", "Open a spreadsheet editor from the year 2000...", "Open an image editor from the year 2000...". This is completely silly; most desktop software still exists in a form that is a recognizable evolution from Y2K versions; DAW is no exception, big deal indeed!
- 7speter 3y ago
  The ribbon ruined office. I bet I could still open office 97 and get everything I want to do wordprocessing wise done, though.
alsetmusic 3y ago
I’d say the current tools are mostly refined and properly mature. I would rather see innovation with plugins, with DAWs staying pretty much as they are.
6stringmerc 3y ago
Yup. Acid Music and Cool Edit Pro 2.0 are great examples to note…poached of course… I’ve dropped more than $1000 with Ableton and always recommend Reaper first.
fragmede 3y ago
We'll see. Companies like Abelton aren't going to throw out their whole codebase and start from scratch, just to accommodate advancements in technology. But if I can just talk to the LLM, and say "hey, gimmie a drum beat, now add in a bass line, no not like that, like <hums into mic>", do I really need the overhead of the traditional view of separate tracks and midi and plugins? When making music is as easy as describing something to Stable Diffusion, it's not that old is automatically bad, but we don't operate car like the Flintstones. When I'm walking, I use my feet, one at a time, over and over again. When I'm in my car, I don't use that same interface to operate my car. I don't take foot steps to make my car move. There's just a button press, with my foot, to make many many footsteps happen. If AI is able to similarly accelerate music production, the old interface may just simply not make sense anymore. Is the old in this case the wheel, which is fundamentally the same, except there have been thousands of years of technological improvements surrounding it, or is it the computer, where modern day computers have only a passing resemblance to the original thing.
- pdntspa 3y ago
  That sort of thing is only going to accelerate the amount of crap, derivative music that is already flooding the market The difference between music and driving a car is that music is art. Many of those who labor in the space enjoy creating from scratch. Technological progress does not automatically make things better
  - fragmede 3y ago
    Crap music that other people made will flood the market, but music that's made just for personal enjoyment will explode. Writing music, creating/recording it, and arranging the tracks in Abelton is a very time (and money) consuming hobby if not done professionally. Learning to play an instrument in the first place can be far more rewarding because it's "yours". Prompt engineering on an LLM will be a total shortcut to creating music, but it will be yours. Commuting to work/school/etc in a car might not be art, but driving for sport, at the top of the profession is very much an art form simply because of the technical skill, creativity, and emotional depth and investment. Just as a musician understands the nuances of their instrument to produce a captivating melody, a driver must intimately know their car's attributes to master each track. The racetrack is their canvas, with split-second decisions, adaptability, and emotional connection to the track, car, and other drivers. Like a well-composed symphony, high-level driving's graceful turns and passes resonate with both the drivers and the viewer. It's not just about who crosses the finish line first (despite what the Fast and the Furious movies told you), but the elegance and finesse required to drive at that level is befitting a music virtuoso to educated viewers. Very much agree on the last point, technological progress often isn't. Electric cars are the future, but the diagonal torque curve of the motor lacks the charm of ICEs.

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

gnulinux 3y ago

Really??? Uh, it's probably my fault but as a hobbyist composer (day job software engineer) I can personally say that tools I use absolutely and utterly suck. They're immensely buggy. My workflow includes: - LilyPond for writing the final notation - MuseScore 4 for playing around, MuseScore 3 for playing MIDI - REAPER as DAW, SFZ plugin for midi soundfonts - Audacity for processing WAV files - music21 python lib if I need to programmatically process MIDI (which I commonly do). My scripts using this lib. - Kdenlive for video processing - Most importantly: my piano Roland FP-30X Now among these the only one I don't hate is FP-30X. That piano is fucking amazing, it sounds and feels great. Kdenlive is also not terrible but I don't do a lot of video processing. Just basic notation videos for YouTube. Everything else is incredibly, incredibly buggy. MuseScore 4 is thrash, almost every interaction I have with it exposes some bug. REAPER is usually fine but there are pretty annoying bugs when it comes to MIDI import/export that involves time signature change. My workflow is so dogshit that last month I decided either I'll write my minimalist tiny notation/DAW tool or reconsider this hobby. So far haven't been able to do anything major but I'm confident I'll invest some time into developing my own tools in late 2023 or early 2024. I'm glad people like their workflow. Unfortunately my own experience with Linux audio processing has been nothing other than encountering one bug after the other one. EDIT: Whoops, don't know why I said Ardour. I never used it, I actually meant REAPER. Fixed now.

radlad 3y ago
> Unfortunately my own experience with Linux audio processing has been nothing other than encountering one bug after the other one. You kind of buried the lede there...
- twangist 3y ago
  "To the man who has only a hammer, everything looks like a nail." Imagine, expecting Linux to provide a productive, frictionless music creation workflow, using programs that aren't exactly torture-tested for usability on the platform. I think you're supposed to be grateful/amazed that they work at all. (Not that the UX would be dramatically better or trouble-free on Windows or a Mac, using the same suite of apps.)
3y ago

scarecrowbob 3y ago

More or less, this. I've worked in a lot of studios with 2" tape or, like Radar or an HD24. In all of those, the engineer had really great chops. Functionally, for most "traditional" (I do a lot of folk, jazz, and country) I just do what they did, and Logic is just a glorified tape machine + mixer + processing. I am still mostly doing stuff in single takes until I like what I have and then maybe punching in a note or two here and there. It's a really fast way of working. And the old stuff I have is quite good: API/Neve front end, AKG/Schoeps mics, genelecs.... these are all things that have been around a long time, and I am not seeing any benefits there for anything- they are fast and easy to use well without a lot of tweaking. Like, you could walk into any studio post 1980 and more or less find things will have a 1-1 correspondence to a modern DAW. There is nothing wrong with those tools, and so I assume folks will keep using them. However, I can see a couple of areas where I think that smarter tools might help. A big chunk of what I am doing already involves programmed drums, and a smarter "Drummer" in logic would be an improvement. Also I (and a lot of other folks) aren't super stoked about harmonies sung by one person overdubbing a bunch of lines. I'd be interested in some workflow where I could, like, sing a harmony and it would change my voice in a credible sounding way. But as far as workflow goes, I really don't need compositional tools- I could do most of my writing tasks with a pencil and notebook.

imbnwa 3y ago
>Also I (and a lot of other folks) aren't super stoked about harmonies sung by one person overdubbing a bunch of lines. I'd be interested in some workflow where I could, like, sing a harmony and it would change my voice in a credible sounding way. This would be a godsend

wazoox 3y ago

"Open a Word processor from the year 2000...", "Open a spreadsheet editor from the year 2000...", "Open an image editor from the year 2000...". This is completely silly; most desktop software still exists in a form that is a recognizable evolution from Y2K versions; DAW is no exception, big deal indeed!

7speter 3y ago
The ribbon ruined office. I bet I could still open office 97 and get everything I want to do wordprocessing wise done, though.

alsetmusic 3y ago

I’d say the current tools are mostly refined and properly mature. I would rather see innovation with plugins, with DAWs staying pretty much as they are.

6stringmerc 3y ago

Yup. Acid Music and Cool Edit Pro 2.0 are great examples to note…poached of course… I’ve dropped more than $1000 with Ableton and always recommend Reaper first.

fragmede 3y ago

We'll see. Companies like Abelton aren't going to throw out their whole codebase and start from scratch, just to accommodate advancements in technology. But if I can just talk to the LLM, and say "hey, gimmie a drum beat, now add in a bass line, no not like that, like <hums into mic>", do I really need the overhead of the traditional view of separate tracks and midi and plugins? When making music is as easy as describing something to Stable Diffusion, it's not that old is automatically bad, but we don't operate car like the Flintstones. When I'm walking, I use my feet, one at a time, over and over again. When I'm in my car, I don't use that same interface to operate my car. I don't take foot steps to make my car move. There's just a button press, with my foot, to make many many footsteps happen. If AI is able to similarly accelerate music production, the old interface may just simply not make sense anymore. Is the old in this case the wheel, which is fundamentally the same, except there have been thousands of years of technological improvements surrounding it, or is it the computer, where modern day computers have only a passing resemblance to the original thing.

pdntspa 3y ago
That sort of thing is only going to accelerate the amount of crap, derivative music that is already flooding the market The difference between music and driving a car is that music is art. Many of those who labor in the space enjoy creating from scratch. Technological progress does not automatically make things better
- fragmede 3y ago
  Crap music that other people made will flood the market, but music that's made just for personal enjoyment will explode. Writing music, creating/recording it, and arranging the tracks in Abelton is a very time (and money) consuming hobby if not done professionally. Learning to play an instrument in the first place can be far more rewarding because it's "yours". Prompt engineering on an LLM will be a total shortcut to creating music, but it will be yours. Commuting to work/school/etc in a car might not be art, but driving for sport, at the top of the profession is very much an art form simply because of the technical skill, creativity, and emotional depth and investment. Just as a musician understands the nuances of their instrument to produce a captivating melody, a driver must intimately know their car's attributes to master each track. The racetrack is their canvas, with split-second decisions, adaptability, and emotional connection to the track, car, and other drivers. Like a well-composed symphony, high-level driving's graceful turns and passes resonate with both the drivers and the viewer. It's not just about who crosses the finish line first (despite what the Fast and the Furious movies told you), but the elegance and finesse required to drive at that level is befitting a music virtuoso to educated viewers. Very much agree on the last point, technological progress often isn't. Electric cars are the future, but the diagonal torque curve of the motor lacks the charm of ICEs.