Live data from Hacker News

What Is the Future of the DAW?

djmag.com

171–180 of 223 posts

Re: What Is the Future of the DAW?

#171
post #162

I am a musician that mainly plays guitar and synths. I have a large eurorack, have tried nearly every MPE compatible synth & controller, and have a massive pedal board. I am also an embedded software engineer and have made audio plugins for VCV Rack. I have written blog posts [0] about MIDI to try to explain it to a technical-ish audience. I have written many, many more posts about why the way we interact with comput…

I can't agree more with this post! As a middle eastern producer trying to incorporate maqam, the workflow is custom...and frustrating...and funnily still better on a workstation. And CV control is not viable as a control for acoustic sampled vsts.

Your opguide site looks like an incredible resource, thank you for creating it!

Re: What Is the Future of the DAW?

#172
I strongly prefer a DAW that I can run locally without an internet connection.

For me the most natural way to incorporate AI would be as "ai people" that have particular skills.

"Master producer Eric" "Loop maker Ryan" "Guitarist Wendy"

You can interact with them in much the same way as human session musician, producer, synth programming etc.

Re: What Is the Future of the DAW?

#173
Ooh, this is an interesting set of comments. I'm currently trying to turn a really old Midimam Keystation 61 into a toy synth for my 3x 10 year old nephews (triplets). I'm using a spare Raspberry pi 4 so it's all gonna be Linux based. But I actually want to make it completely headless because DAWs are too complex and, IMHO, get between the person and the noises they're making. My goal is to hook up a Korg nanoKONTROL2 and use it as the only extra "surface" between the kid and the music. I'm at the very early stages of it right now but I can choose one of 16 midi channels, hit a key and make a noise. I haven't actually done anything with the nano.

Re: What Is the Future of the DAW?

#174
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DJ mag aint what it used to be. The top 100 is pretty much a joke to most people who care about music.

Yeah the top 100 is super weird, it’s all these commercial EDM DJs but the weird thing is the magazine doesn’t otherwise really seem to target that audience. I don’t read it but I have come across some good long form pieces like this from them online, so actually I think they are trying to do some good stuff.

I'd imagine that it's because the DJs ask people to vote for them. A lot of the DJs I follow do that every year. If the big commercial DJs with the biggest following do that, then they would naturally land at the top.

Re: What Is the Future of the DAW?

#175
post #9

TFA 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…

Any recommendations for #3? Particularly with low barrier of entry for kids? Something you can use a midi keyboard and a mic with?

Garageband - my kids love it.

Re: What Is the Future of the DAW?

#176
post #9

TFA 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…

Any recommendations for #3? Particularly with low barrier of entry for kids? Something you can use a midi keyboard and a mic with?

I commented elsewhere, but my goal is to hide the DAW as completely as i can and give them a midi keyboard, Korg nanoKONTROL2 and some background config or automation that lets them choose synth sounds and record themselves play. As someone who played piano to a decent level up to my teens, I've always felt that throwing up a DAW just gets in the way of making music. Especially when I'm getting back into it after a long break. Complicated interfaces just sap my time and energy and I eventually find that I've wasted a lot of time without striking a key on the piano.

Re: What Is the Future of the DAW?

#177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any pointers on where to start with all that? I can grok Audacity (which is a handy but terribly basic program). When it came to Reaper, I found it very confusing, and never managed to do much with it. My needs are basically voice only.

Yeah, of course! But, this will be a thing that I hope doesn't get flagged. I have a totally free course for configuring reaper for VO at academy.boothjunkie.com. it goes through all my initial optimizations for reaper. If you're comfortable with your VST setup, this will go a long way in getting you started, and you can incorporate your VO chain. If you want to take this out of HN and talk more specifically, my webs…

I think that's cool. I asked you for something, and you kindly responded with helpful information.

Re: What Is the Future of the DAW?

#178
post #157

I’ve been working on a next gen DAW for a few years and this article misses all of my priorities. AI will encourage mindless replication; instead modern tooling should be analytical, precise, deliberate, flexible, and have layered complexity. My priorities are more in line with turning music production into an integrated and interactive development environment using modern design principles. Sub-modular capability, A…

Fascinating! Is there anywhere where we can follow development of this?

Re: What Is the Future of the DAW?

#179
post #157

I’ve been working on a next gen DAW for a few years and this article misses all of my priorities. AI will encourage mindless replication; instead modern tooling should be analytical, precise, deliberate, flexible, and have layered complexity. My priorities are more in line with turning music production into an integrated and interactive development environment using modern design principles. Sub-modular capability, A…

Spot on. It's telling that most DAW UIs are based on archaic ideas (like mixers/tracks and MIDI/step-sequencer grids). Even BuzzTracker (2009) outshines many of the current DAWs with DAG instrument/effects-chaining and arrow-key/cursor navigation.

My post-graduate research concerned signal-rather-than-event-based generation/transformation of compositional data, integrated with textural/timbral synthesis.

My current focus is building a DSP framework for this purpose in C++20 [1].

In any case I'm interested in following your progress, and happy to contribute code/ideas if you feel like collaborating (links in profile).

[1] https://github.com/synthetic-methods/xtal

Re: What Is the Future of the DAW?

#180
The Future of the DAW is DAW-less.

A Synthstrom Deluge, a humble Eurorack (morphagene!) and a microFreak ..

A Zynthian! Holy molies, live Zynthian compositions are binoculars!

1010music Bluebox+Blackbox.

SonicWARE SmplTek.

Monome. Oh dear, monome is a hell of a platform for next-generation DAW tomfoolery!

Notice a pattern? Its the hardware. You can no longer call it a workstation when, after all, it behaves like an instrument.

Post reply on HN