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”.
The fact that the article was in DJMag might have been a clue?
What Is the Future of the DAW?
41–50 of 223 posts
Re: What Is the Future of the DAW?
#42I 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.
Re: What Is the Future of the DAW?
#43DAWs 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,…
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.
Re: What Is the Future of the DAW?
#44DAWs 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,…
> a quick way to shuffle pieces of a song like "bridge" and "verse
Present in the about-to-be-released Ardour 8 (using a design very similar to Studio One).
Re: What Is the Future of the DAW?
#45I 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.
Re: What Is the Future of the DAW?
#46DAW 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 processi…
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.
Re: What Is the Future of the DAW?
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
In the mid-late 2000's, Ardour (and a couple of other DAWs) had support for branching undo/redo histories. We (Ardour) abandoned it, because the universal experience of non-programmers was that they had no idea how to even begin to use this sort of feature. The majority of DAW users don't come ready to deal with the complexities of a branching workflow, or even a desire to learn it. There is at least one band out of…
There are plenty of apps like Figma and Google Docs that have a kind collaboration and version control that non-programmers are able to understand.
Re: What Is the Future of the DAW?
#48DAW 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 processi…
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…
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.
Re: What Is the Future of the DAW?
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the mid-late 2000's, Ardour (and a couple of other DAWs) had support for branching undo/redo histories. We (Ardour) abandoned it, because the universal experience of non-programmers was that they had no idea how to even begin to use this sort of feature. The majority of DAW users don't come ready to deal with the complexities of a branching workflow, or even a desire to learn it. There is at least one band out of…
There are plenty of apps like Figma and Google Docs that have a kind collaboration and version control that non-programmers are able to understand.
I was specifically referring to branching workflows, not version control in general.
Re: What Is the Future of the DAW?
#50DAW 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 processi…
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…
Yah these are all well understood, however, you don't get to nuclear reactors without inventing some new math supporting subatomic physics.
Saying that audio has "different set of constraints from other types of workloads" and giving up on fundamental algorithm research is just defeatist, throwing in the towel, and frankly really insulting to human advancement.
Come on, we need some new algorithms and just saying "whelp it can't be done" is kind of ... not the hacker spirit.
It could be that we need quantum algorithms for parallel processing what previously was thought to be serial. Just from reading your well reasoned paragraph, I can see we desperately need fundamental algorithm research in sound processing.
An imaginary scenario might to to invent an algorithm to convert/transform sound/pressure wave information into another domain, one that is not dependent on serial time, and then do the operations, and then re-convert it back to the time domain that we usually associate with sound processing. Where, within this alternative domain, parallel processing is possible.
We do stuff like this all the time in other disciplines. Even stuff like the FFT was an attempt to transform and make certain "unsolvable" problem solvable in another form.
That's the kind of math research that I'm referring to.