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Show HN: An attempt to rethink a music sequencer design

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Re: Show HN: An attempt to rethink a music sequencer design

#111

Post by jdietrich »

stfnfhrmnn wrote: post #108
jdietrich wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There is plenty of room in the music software landscape for tools that focus entirely on placing notes instead of generating production-quality sound. There's already an industry standard for that - Avid Sibelius. If you're composing in a traditional manner, a DAW probably isn't the right tool. http://www.avid.com/sibelius

Sibelius and Finale used to be the industry standard, but there is a new kid on the block for music notation: Steinberg Dorico Other new tools like Staffpad are amazing, but they serve a somewhat different market.

Dorico is clearly the future given Avid's shabby treatment of Sibelius users, but I'm not sure it's the present. It might just be inertia or switching costs, but Dorico hasn't been adopted by many composers yet. I haven't yet used the v1.1 update, but v1.0 was missing a lot of important features.

Re: Show HN: An attempt to rethink a music sequencer design

#112

Post by jdietrich »

archagon wrote: post #86
jdietrich wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There is plenty of room in the music software landscape for tools that focus entirely on placing notes instead of generating production-quality sound. There's already an industry standard for that - Avid Sibelius. If you're composing in a traditional manner, a DAW probably isn't the right tool. http://www.avid.com/sibelius

I've used Sibelius (and Finale) back in the day. For classical music, maybe it's indeed the right tool to use. But if you're writing modern music, with all its syncopation and irregularity, it's simply painful. Rests, dotted notes, and ties everywhere. Massive, piece-wide refactoring pains with even the smallest changes. Key signature horror. Obscure notation. Lack of true support for pitch bending and non-standard t…

As a Sibelius user and jazz musician who writes avant-garde music, I humbly disagree. Classical notation is my native language. It's an odd and idiosyncratic language, but it works. If you need musicians to understand what you've written, it's your only option. I can't read piano roll at tempo and I don't know anyone who can.

Sibelius has fairly good support for swing, shuffle and irregular meter. It has natively supported quartertones since version 6; plugins provide good support for alternative tunings and microtonal composition. Classical notation can get clumsy if you're doing really weird things, but "really weird" is a higher bar than you'd expect.

If you're using timbre as a fundamental expressive element, then a DAW is probably the right tool. At present, we have no useful system for notating synthetic timbres.

Re: Show HN: An attempt to rethink a music sequencer design

#113

Post by badosu »

joemi wrote: post #79
badosu wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"There's vim as well: http://csound.github.io/"

Csound is more analogous to GCC than it is to Vim, though. I'd say something akin to Vim would be a tracker: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_tracker

Agreed, if PCM [0] is assembly, Csound certainly could be C.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulse-code_modulation

Re: Show HN: An attempt to rethink a music sequencer design

#114

Post by rhizome »

vortico wrote: post #100
badosu wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, pure data is a 'higher-level' sound programming environment, so it could be emacs.

+1 Best analogy. The interface actually reminded me of emacs when I used to use PD.

Out of curiosity, what did you graduate to?

Re: Show HN: An attempt to rethink a music sequencer design

#115

Post by vortico »

rhizome wrote: post #114
vortico wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1 Best analogy. The interface actually reminded me of emacs when I used to use PD.

Out of curiosity, what did you graduate to?

Switched to Sublime Text years ago. I just have my configuration, and it works fine for me, so no need to change it for the rest of my life. I don't even care if it's not updated ever again.

Re: Show HN: An attempt to rethink a music sequencer design

#116

Post by rhizome »

vortico wrote: post #115
rhizome wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity, what did you graduate to?

Switched to Sublime Text years ago. I just have my configuration, and it works fine for me, so no need to change it for the rest of my life. I don't even care if it's not updated ever again.

Oh, I thought you had graduated from pd.

Re: Show HN: An attempt to rethink a music sequencer design

#117

Post by vortico »

rhizome wrote: post #116
vortico wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Switched to Sublime Text years ago. I just have my configuration, and it works fine for me, so no need to change it for the rest of my life. I don't even care if it's not updated ever again.

Oh, I thought you had graduated from pd.

Oh right, in that case, I use mostly C++ for that, along with my own platform I'm developing.

Re: Show HN: An attempt to rethink a music sequencer design

#118

Post by virgil_disgr4ce »

wheels wrote: post #74
virgil_disgr4ce wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a LOT of binaries involved (in the sense of large .wav files at least), and I doubt the Live file format particularly lends itself to text-based version control

The Live file format is gzipped XML. It very much lends itself to text-based version control. (I've even played around with adding such as a third party.)

Whoa, cool! Good to know—thanks!

Re: Show HN: An attempt to rethink a music sequencer design

#119

Post by tripzilch »

ssharp wrote: post #10

"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 do think there is a big hole for a cross-platform DAW that's at least halfway decent

well there's Renoise ( http://renoise.com ), which is IMHO, amazing.

it's just that, it's based on the old-school trackers paradigm (like Fast Tracker, Impulse Tracker, etc), which not everybody likes (but is actually a great fit for cutting up breakbeats and stuff that fit step-sequencer like workflows). Enhanced with support for VSTs, LADSPA etc (and built-in effects of course) and a sampler interface to design instruments that kinda blows the socks off just about anything.

so there's that. and I love it :)

but I do agree there's a big hole for a DAW with a good piano-roll and "stretchy" timelines like the arrangement view in Ableton. especially the way you can navigate the timeline by dragging on it left and right, but dragging up and down to zoom, such an intuitive way to navigate in sonic material where you often want to be able to zoom from hawks-eye overview to dive straight down and adjust some detail in the 10s of milliseconds, and back. I don't get why nobody has copied this way of navigation, it's IMHO right up there with ableton's timestretch/markers features that make it great. Yes Bitwig copied it, but that's partially Ableton's team.

Bitwig is crossplatform, btw. But I never could get it do what I wanted. But I had a sort of temporary/educational license which expired and wowww was that program ever completely useless in demo-version.

Speaking of that, it's the main reason why I started using Renoise. It was the only program that was even remotely useful in demo-version (just disabled export-to-wav and render-to-sample, inconvenient, but doesn't make the program useless, you can always record your sound in another way). Of course I got it licensed by now, having had way too much fun with it. It's only like 85 euros (including tax), compare to what you pay for Ableton nowadays, which doesn't even run on Linux.

Oh and we all know there's no "best" DAW, right? No shame in using multiple tools, each for which is best at what it does, and just bounce the audio through your OS audio framework (there's equivalents for JACK on Windows and Mac, right?)

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