Intriguing, I'll give it a whirl for a few weeks to see if it can tempt me back from hardware sequencers.
Show HN: An attempt to rethink a music sequencer design
31–40 of 119 posts
Re: Show HN: An attempt to rethink a music sequencer design
#32"Most of the DAW interfaces often seem overcomplicated, and they only tend to get more and more bloated over time." How much can you simplify the interface and still make it do everything producers want to do? Garageband simplified the interface quite a bit compared to Logic, but even that can get complicated and ultimately isn't as flexible as other DAWs. I've been a fairly loyal user of Sonar and FL Studio for over…
I think the analogy is "In the music world, we have the choice between the equivalent of XCode or Visual Studio to compose - here's Atom."
In fact, I was quite inspired by Sublime Text, but not Atom/Electron.
Re: Show HN: An attempt to rethink a music sequencer design
#33I would really like the equivalent of Unity in the DAW world. Let me script modulators/sound design while doing arrangement/mixing and stuff in UI.
max/msp might be of interest, then: https://cycling74.com/products/max/
Re: Show HN: An attempt to rethink a music sequencer design
#34"Most of the DAW interfaces often seem overcomplicated, and they only tend to get more and more bloated over time." How much can you simplify the interface and still make it do everything producers want to do? Garageband simplified the interface quite a bit compared to Logic, but even that can get complicated and ultimately isn't as flexible as other DAWs. I've been a fairly loyal user of Sonar and FL Studio for over…
It is possible to simplify the interface by reducing the number of tools without necessarily removing functionality. The idea is to identify large sets of tools that can be replaced with a handful of powerful combinable tools to perform the same tasks - this is not always easy but if done well can end up not only simplifying UI but providing more powerful, intuitive tools and reducing unnecessary learning. I think Mo…
I think this is an interesting idea, and sounds cool in principle, but the problem is that many users wouldn't know how to combine components together to get the tools/effects/instruments they want, or wouldn't want to bother to learn. The point being that all you might achieve with this approach is to substitute one type of complexity for another, and so you'd still alienate potential users. Maybe different potential users.
Depending on the market segment you're after that might be OK though.
Re: Show HN: An attempt to rethink a music sequencer design
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
Somewhat this. However, I am sometimes reminded by my more creative minded friends to abandon the rigid developer mentality of 'commit and keep everything ever; just in case' and instead follow a more creative focus on just making something. I have practically found that exploring too many ideas and branches ultimately delays the completion of any creative process ;)
What if the tool does the committing, and automatically does the commits as deltas? Something like the idea that the 'save' is fairly similar to the undo-redo data rather than some optimized object graph or optimized relational database representing one iteration.
Ardour has snapshots [1] which is a somewhat manual approach to this. I assume you can copy/paste parts of a session between snapshots as a "merge".
[1] http://manual.ardour.org/working-with-sessions/snapshots/
Re: Show HN: An attempt to rethink a music sequencer design
#36It has a product home page:
One of the features is "Incomplete - Helio is a one-man hobby project, that is a work in progress. The author builds it for himself and shares with the world."
I give +1 for honesty.
Honestly it has the same "piano roll" grid layout many other programs I've dabbled with have (garage band, ableton). It has linux support which is great.
Re: Show HN: An attempt to rethink a music sequencer design
#37This looks very nice! I'll have to give it a try soon.
If anyone is interested, I've also taken a whirl at solving the problem of overcomplicated DAW interfaces, albeit in a more limited capacity. My first project in this vein is Composer's Sketchpad[1], which aims to explore "freehand composition" by letting users draw notes in strokes directly with their fingers or stylus, bending the pitch and adjusting the length as they go along. The second is MusicMessages![2], in which every note is a button in a giant scroll view, allowing the user to enter and adjust quick melodies with just a few taps.
While these apps will never be remotely as powerful as a fully featured DAW, they allow the user to explore certain kinds of musical ideas far more efficiently than with FL Studio or Logic. In my opinion, one of the biggest barriers in creative thinking is the amount of cruft and micro decision-making between the artist and their output, and musical composition is particularly bad at this — there's no "lightweight Markdown editor" equivalent for composition quite yet. Helio is very exciting because it has some of those same benefits while sitting far closer to a professional DAW. I'm very interested to see where it goes!
[1]: http://composerssketchpad.com
[2]: http://musicmessages.io (currently working on a full iOS version as a separate app... will fold the Messages extension into that one)
Re: Show HN: An attempt to rethink a music sequencer design
#38"Most of the DAW interfaces often seem overcomplicated, and they only tend to get more and more bloated over time." How much can you simplify the interface and still make it do everything producers want to do? Garageband simplified the interface quite a bit compared to Logic, but even that can get complicated and ultimately isn't as flexible as other DAWs. I've been a fairly loyal user of Sonar and FL Studio for over…
It is possible to simplify the interface by reducing the number of tools without necessarily removing functionality. The idea is to identify large sets of tools that can be replaced with a handful of powerful combinable tools to perform the same tasks - this is not always easy but if done well can end up not only simplifying UI but providing more powerful, intuitive tools and reducing unnecessary learning. I think Mo…
You're describing the Unix philosophy. It's popular, but not in these domains.
Re: Show HN: An attempt to rethink a music sequencer design
#39Looks a lot like Melodyne. And FL Studio. A "re-think" would be using depth of space to be able to go "in and out" like layers. It's a nice project and I hope it was gratifying.
Reaper has solved the issue of "One Simple DAW to rule them all" for me (used to be Cool Edit Pro 2.0) because it genuinely covers so much usable turf (Max is not in the same conversation as 'simple DAW'). It is the best mousetrap for the money on the market.
Re: Show HN: An attempt to rethink a music sequencer design
#40I would really urge the developer to identify the target audience for this and to define what needs they have that may not be met by the current crop of similar tools.
I would also recommend finding some of those people, talking to them directly, and watch as they learn to use this application.
For this to survive in a crowded marketplace it is going to have to find and serve a niche very well.