DAW = Digital Audio Workstation.
I expect the future of the DAW is a Xeon-powered machine from Dell or HP with Adobe Creative Cloud (CC.)
What Is the Future of the DAW?
51–60 of 223 posts
Re: What Is the Future of the DAW?
#52DAW = Digital Audio Workstation. I expect the future of the DAW is a Xeon-powered machine from Dell or HP with Adobe Creative Cloud (CC.)
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Re: What Is the Future of the DAW?
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 "wh…
Parallel processing isn't "interesting" except as a way to do things more quickly.
But for 90% or more of the things people do in DAWs (and currently want to do in DAWs), current processors can already do it fast enough.
So the sort of innovation your dreaming of/imagining isn't going to come from new algorithms - it's going to come from people wanting to do new things.
This is already happening to some extent with things like timbral transfer, but even there, the most important part of it is well within current processing capabilities.
> Come on, we need some new algorithms
If you don't have a "why", that doesn't make much sense. Start with "Come on, we need to be able to do " and then (maybe) the algorithms will follow.
Necessity is the mother of invention, but so is desire. What do you desire?
Re: What Is the Future of the DAW?
#54DAW 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…
It’s still pretty new, but people are taking advantage of GPUs for audio these days: https://www.gpu.audio
Re: What Is the Future of the DAW?
#55TFA starts down an important path - identifying different categories of users - but doesn't really get this quite right IMO. There are (at least) four categories of DAW users: 1. Professionals who are being paid to make music, and for whom time is essentially money. Tools that speed up the production of that music are both financially valuable to them, and also make their overall lives easier (if done right). 2. Musi…
There's a couple other taxonomy of DAW users that you're ignoring, which are people creating audio content that isn't music.
Re: What Is the Future of the DAW?
#56How can you write this article only interviewing a bunch of startups? Tim Exile is a very interesting and visionary dude, but without serious contributions from Ableton or Apple on the DAW side this article feels a bit listless - none of these others are real players in the space.
You might want to consider what that sounds like if you rewind it to say, 2002. Ableton is a small startup in Berlin. The dominant DAWs include several that don't even do MIDI. Apple hasn't yet acquired Logic by buying Emagic. Why would expect the next steps to come from "real players in the space", when the previous next steps did not? Look at how quickly Presonus managed to build Studio One to a crazy-level of cred…
Because it’s not 2002? As you say, music production capable workstations didn’t really exist. To count out extremely capable incumbents in favour of reporting the opinions of bandlab who bought Cakewalk in a fire sale and haven’t really had much of a dent from what I can tell seems strange.
No solid quotes from presonus either.
Re: What Is the Future of the DAW?
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 "wh…
Parallel processing isn't "interesting" except as a way to do things more quickly. But for 90% or more of the things people do in DAWs (and currently want to do in DAWs), current processors can already do it fast enough. So the sort of innovation your dreaming of/imagining isn't going to come from new algorithms - it's going to come from people wanting to do new things. This is already happening to some extent with t…
The desire would be to work with sound artists and acoustic designers and product designers and engineers to make certain types of audio spaces.
A lot of the cutting edge of acoustic research is from people wanting to make materials and spaces do certain things with sound.
For example, this article describes a system that lets sound through one way This was described in https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-one-way-street-... ("an acoustic circulator") - the need will come from things like this.
And for musicians, artists, and instrument makers to make use of materials, devices, and spaces like this. That would be my answer to your question of where the need/why will come from.
Imagine needing to write a DAW module to deal with "one way sound" that results from using an acoustic circulator in a musical production or a song.
Re: What Is the Future of the DAW?
#58TFA starts down an important path - identifying different categories of users - but doesn't really get this quite right IMO. There are (at least) four categories of DAW users: 1. Professionals who are being paid to make music, and for whom time is essentially money. Tools that speed up the production of that music are both financially valuable to them, and also make their overall lives easier (if done right). 2. Musi…
There's a couple other taxonomy of DAW users that you're ignoring, which are people creating audio content that isn't music.
See my #4 ... but also feel free to expand the taxonomy!
Re: What Is the Future of the DAW?
#59I 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…
Agree with the text input being annoying and possibly more of an impedance. Personally i would prefer to speak out the sound i want (think beat boxing noises) and then have the generative ai give me an array of similar sounds and then i can just drag and drop where i want it
Writing into a prompt feels opposite to the creative process but as a first pass its a cool tool, kudos
Re: What Is the Future of the DAW?
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
You might want to consider what that sounds like if you rewind it to say, 2002. Ableton is a small startup in Berlin. The dominant DAWs include several that don't even do MIDI. Apple hasn't yet acquired Logic by buying Emagic. Why would expect the next steps to come from "real players in the space", when the previous next steps did not? Look at how quickly Presonus managed to build Studio One to a crazy-level of cred…
Because it’s not 2002? As you say, music production capable workstations didn’t really exist. To count out extremely capable incumbents in favour of reporting the opinions of bandlab who bought Cakewalk in a fire sale and haven’t really had much of a dent from what I can tell seems strange. No solid quotes from presonus either.
> As you say, music production capable workstations didn’t really exist.
Didn't say that. They absolutely did!
It took a small startup in Berlin to introduce the idea that maybe everything should be tied to the groove, always. That was not 100% revolutionary (Acid could do some of that), but it upended computer-based music production entirely.
The incumbents are very, very unlikely to have access to people with a deep/serious interest in "AI & music" technology (maybe Apple?). Startups in this space are started by those people.