Meadowlark, a DAW written in Rust • Hacker News Board

Re: Meadowlark, a DAW written in Rust

#121

Post by romwell » Thu, Nov 04, 2021, 4:43 PM UTC

goblinkingmatt wrote: post #109

romwell wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Ability to make turns is a non-goal for the MVP of the car we're building" You can't record a cover of Queen's We Are The Champions or Somebody To Love without struggling with the UI if 3/4 is not supported. Or Blondie's Call Me. Or a plethora of other popular music. "Fully Featured (in our imagination)"

why couldn't you record Call Me?

Because you'd have Hours Of Fun with all the drums being triplets if you want to sequence them.

4/4 with triplets, swung rhythms, etc are not supported by their design.

And while you can record things, editing becomes clunky when the grid isn't there for you. At that point, it's easier to re-record the part. Or switch to another DAW.

Re: Meadowlark, a DAW written in Rust

#122

Post by romwell » Thu, Nov 04, 2021, 4:52 PM UTC

kodokoto wrote: post #117

romwell wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TL;DR: you don't have experience in the subject you opine on, but wonder why someone who does would. I'll address these points below. --------- >I'm not sure why the amount of audio production experience is relevant in this case. Because that's what would make you qualified to have an opinion on the matter, or make an analogy. If you don't use a DAW regularly to make music, you are not qualified to say that lack of 3…

I'm also a music producer/sound designer and audio engineer. Not being able to change the time signature isn't that big of a deal... Well over 90% of music is 4/4 and even other common ones like 3/4 can still be written in a DAW set to 4/4. As a musician, I'd rather see them spend time working on some unique features rather than something niche that can be added on later (apparently somewhat trivially). Seems like a…

Addendum: 6/8, etc might be under 10% of music, but it's played by well over 90% of musicians.

The freaking Fur Elise is 3/8, and it's the Stairway to Heaven of keyboardists.

This is a rather strange limitation for a DAW.

Re: Meadowlark, a DAW written in Rust

#123

Post by BillyDM » Thu, Nov 04, 2021, 5:26 PM UTC

romwell wrote: post #120

kodokoto wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm also a music producer/sound designer and audio engineer. Not being able to change the time signature isn't that big of a deal... Well over 90% of music is 4/4 and even other common ones like 3/4 can still be written in a DAW set to 4/4. As a musician, I'd rather see them spend time working on some unique features rather than something niche that can be added on later (apparently somewhat trivially). Seems like a…

I once wrote a track where 4/4 changed into 3/4 mid-song, and then back in a beta DAW that didn't have a time signature track at the time (Energy XT2). So while it's possible , it's also annoying. You can't use the DAW click, and clips don't align with (what the DAW thiks are) measures. This is added friction, and you know what it did? It made me stay away from making music like that because I don't want to be clicki…

Alright, I get it. Non-4/4 time signatures are in much higher demand than I originally thought.

* edit - I'm not trying to sound mean. I just want to make it clear for those who may have not read my other comments on this HN post.

I thought it was clear that these non-features are only for the MVP, not the released "1.0 version", but apparently I was wrong. The "final" 1.0 version will indeed have support for other time signatures. Although because demand is apparently very high, I will likely add it to the MVP as well.

The way I have this designed, it is in fact trivial to add other time signatures later. The backend code only uses musical time as a unit of beats, it does not care about measures. Measures are purely just a visual thing for the GUI. Yes there are special plugins that care about measure like drum sequencers and advanced arpeggiators, but neither of those things are planned for MVP, so it's not like we will have to "rewrite" them.

What is not trivial to rewrite is support for non-western scales and microtonal stuff, which is why those are being included in the MVP.

The title of this HN post was updated, it now has correctly removed "fully-featured" in the title. Neither I or anyone on the Meadowlark team made this HN post. We got publicity a lot sooner than we thought we would, so we weren't even fully ready to make a full public announcement on the project yet. The design doc is still somewhat of a draft.

Re: Meadowlark, a DAW written in Rust

#124

Post by drogus » Fri, Nov 05, 2021, 3:36 PM UTC

falcolas wrote: post #31

lijogdfljk wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. Furthermore, Rust is/was imo a controversial language - early on some argued it was "too difficult" to write "real" applications in it. I'm super interested in real world performance intensive applications written in Rust, Haskell, etc. Language matters to me, even if i don't plan on participating.

Rust is about as controversial as Python these days, though for different reasons. To be clear, I'm not annoyed at it being called out here (much - it gets old no matter which langauge is pimped). I'm most annoyed at how much space in the features doc, which should be about the project, not the internals.

This is an early version of the project, so this is most likely not directed at end users. Why would you even address end users at this point? Nobody will use it for a long time anyway, so in my opinion is a great move to address potential contributors in the design doc.