What Is the Future of the DAW?

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 computers is ... sub-optiminal [1] and why new controllers are making it better [2]. I've also written a post reflecting on how AI Art tools like Stable Diffusion have/will affect artists [3] [4]. On my site, I have a list of DAWs and a simple Pro/Con view of each [5]. I have reviewed Emergent Drums, an AI drum-sample tool (and gave it a poor rating) [6]

All of that credential waving is to say, I think about this a lot. The software workflow is so bad that I have resorted to buying an insane amount of hardware, so, what makes it so bad? * Latency correction hell. - Only an issue for musicians not working entirely digitally * Limited I/O (albeit this wouldn't be an issue if I could get away with using less hardware) - You can't use more than 1 audio interface at a time in Windows * Interface navigation hell - VSTs all load as individual windows - There's often still issues with DPI scaling * DRM hell on those virtual instruments * Software stability hell - Not all DAWs sandbox plugins * Complex routings are often complicated - In audio-contexts, we often want to pipe signal around in branching - diverging & merging - paths, often with signals from unrelated chains changing things (ex: sidechain compression from a bass drum)

But I can almost forgive all of those issues. The real issue is and will continue to be MIDI. * 127 values for knobs? Really? That's quantization you can hear. * No good support for microtonal - Current hacks often break down realllllly bad with big scale. If you're in 31EDO, for example, you only get 4 octaves of range. * Clocking is a disaster, making swing, polyrhythms, etc. more of a mess than they need be.

Those are issues that legitimately limit the expressiveness of all music creation. You can't fine-tune a value in MIDI, you can't play between notes (barring MPE, which itself is a hack and not supported in all DAWs), and - combined with the latency problems above - it means *both* your traditional instrument (ie Guitar) and digital interfaced (MIDI) will have weird latency issues.

AI is not the solution and there's more than one problem. There are a few things which could help: * MIDI 2.0 / OSC / Literally anything with more resolution * Designing with more than just western music theory in mind (microtonal, swing/complex grooves, etc.) * A standardized framework for UI

I think VCV rack [7], albeit it absolutely isn't a general purpose DAW, does a good job of addressing many of these issues, but it can't handle more basic use cases either. Sequencing a long track in it is like pulling teeth and performance is quite bad due to processing everything as float's sample-by-sample, not as a buffer.

I do have some hope that change is coming. The Blockhead DAW [8] rightly has many musicians following this space excited for it's novel approach of treating audio in the timeline as a much more fluid source for quick modification rather than baked content you have to modify elsewhere.

There is, ultimately, an incredible amount of complexity that music software has to account for. I could muse(score) about why this is the case: it could audio having a temporal element, unlike a text editor or maybe just the inherit complexities that arise from trying to create with a medium where you have to consider such an extreme amount of information that caries with it cultural context and an ease of offense to the senses that no other medium suffers (Bad audio is much less tolerable than bad video).

No matter the case, it means that a DAW and the interacting with it needs to be very tightly integrated and intentionally designed with good standards while also being highly flexible. We nailed the flexibility, but totally dropped the ball on intentional design and standards that work for us. I don't think that can be un-done now, not without throwing away support for legitimately amazing tools.

While I'm risking going pure-tangent, I also want to mention that there being no good method for hardware acceleration is a limiting factor in the audio world, along with better standards for UI and data transport, we're in desperate need of an open hardware acceleration standard that's easy to use and not crazy expensive. I should be able to throw in a DSP card just like I can throw in a big GPU and have enough umpf in my system not be constantly worrying about freezing tracks or having audio underruns. This is an extra reason for having as much hardware as I do: A lot of DSP distortions eat CPU and sound really bad.

[0] https://opguides.info/music/midi/ [1] https://opguides.info/other/hci2/intro/ [2] https://opguides.info/music/instruments/#expressiveness-and-... [3] https://opguides.info/posts/aiartpanic/ [4] https://opguides.info/posts/ai2/ [5] https://opguides.info/music/software/daw/ [6] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zpq7g9CcGv4 [7] https://vcvrack.com [8] https://twitter.com/ColugoMusic

I remember spending days at a time in Audacity and have no crash (talking over a decade). Now everytime I use it I find a new way to crash it and it didn't evolve that much (compared to things like Ardour that went really far in the last decade including in stability).

What does it do that you prefer?

If you have the money I'd recommend a monome Norns or Teleype. You also may look into 100r Orca and Midinous both of which run fine on Windows and abstract out the pain of developing an Windows

I think that the audio space hasn't evolved because there isn't a lot of money in it and it's a bad environment for learning proper technique. The cross section of expertise is quite rare: music theory, instrumentalism, signal processing, software engineering, performance optimization, architecture design, research tooling, musical perspective, user interface, sound design, etc. The fact that things haven't effectively changed in decades means that the cost of changing is so large that something has to be radically better to convince people to alter their process. People generally are not capable of seeing what is possible outside of their scope of familiarity.