Meadowlark, a DAW written in Rust

I'm not sure why the amount of audio production experience is relevant in this case. I also don't have a horse in this race. I just find it curious that you seem to be so extremely passionate about taking a random item in a _design_ for an _MVP_ and drawing all sorts of conclusions about both the tool and the authors of this tool. Why does it matter so much that it doesn't align with what you find the most important aspect of an MVP?

Again, this is even just a _design_ for an MVP. If it doesn't align with what _you_ find important then that's fine. Just use something else, you've clearly been doing so for about 15 years. I hope you've enjoyed working on your songs, just like the authors of Meadowlark are enjoying working on this DAW.

Not just somewhat arbitrarily invented scales from the west ... in Byzantine musical culture, they do not have or assume the concept of "octave equivalence". That is, doubling the frequency of a sound does not, in classical Byzantine music, constitute "the same note". Byzantine musical culture is wonderful in so many ways. They rarely notate pitches, preferring to notate intervals, which as anyone who has ever tranposed a song from one western major scale to another will understand, is far more of a deep representation of a melody than pitches.

Ardour author here.

> it's also not truly FLOSS as it requires a paid license to download the binaries, (same for Ardour on non-Linux systems)).

This does not stop something being FLOSS. The GPL that we release Ardour under is 100% consistent with charging money for a ready-to-run version. And we even actively encourage people who have problems doing that to get a copy from a friend. There is nothing in any FLOSS license that requires gratis access to pre-built binaries; anyone is free to get the source and build it themselves, if they are up for the task. Most DAW users are not interested in this, and we chose to use it as a way to help fund the last 10+ years of what is now a 21 year old project.

> Ardour is okay, but only if you don't mess with MIDI.

There are plenty of people using Ardour's MIDI very successfully, even if it remains true that our MIDI workflow could use some significant improvements. Version 7 will hopefully see a great deal of changes in this area, and it will be a primary focus of the early 7.x release series.

> Third, my plan in regard to time signature is to abstract away all the logic into the `https://github.com/RustyDAW/rusty-daw-timeline` repo. It's sole purpose it to be a black-box that takes a function of musical time (f64 of beats) and returns sample time (represented as i64), and vice versa.

Good luck. This is likely to be much, much harder to get right than you currently imagine. I made a few notes about the "new" system in Ardour here: https://ardour.org/timing.html Although some other DAWs do use float representation for time, our experience has been that it's a terrible idea. Fixed point is much easier to deal with.

In some ways, it's always nice and even a little exciting to see a new FLOSS (or even non-FLOSS DAW) starting up. On the other, it is a bit frustrating knowing how much developer time and brain power will have to go into getting to where Ardour was (say) 10 years ago rather than pushing existing projects (like Ardour) forward. Good luck!

Ardour currently makes more than $200k per year. Harrison Mixbus is a distinct product from that.

I never wanted to step down. There was a brief interval when it looked as if I would have to, in order to make a living. That has not been the case for more than a decade now.

We have many users who have used many other DAWs, including Reaper. A good chunk of them strongly prefer Ardour to Reaper. Another good chunk do not.

Reaper is not the most powerful tool. There are dozens of things you can easily do in Ardour that you cannot do in Reaper, and just as many for which the opposite is true. Reaper has no clip launching model / session view, which is what allowed Live to change the entire zeitgeist of computer-based music production (now copied into Bitwig, Logic, DP and right about now, Ardour). It doesn't even get into the modulation ballpark that Bitwig is playing in, and completely lacks the freeform flow that FL Studio allows.

The reality remains that there is no "best" DAW for anyone. Plenty of people think that Ardour sucks, and for their workflow, you just have to respect their verdict. Just as many people try Reaper and find it impossible to use. Fortunately these days there's a DAW for everyone, and Meadowlark will only make that more true.

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.

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>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 3/4 support is just like having no parking sensor.

You don't have an understanding of which features are important if you are not a user. (Speaking of which, I hope you at least drove a car!).

>I also don't have a horse in this race

Well, you commented on the issue. There's your horse.

>I just find it curious that you seem to be so extremely passionate

As a musician, yes, I'm so extremely passionate about the art and craft of music making - and the tools involved.

Just like literally any other musician. We are passionate because music is how we express passion.

On top of it, I get sad when people express unsubstantiated opinions when confidence on the issues that I care about.

>Why does it matter so much that it doesn't align with what you find the most important aspect of an MVP?

Why does it matter to the developers to say that this is a project "by musicians, for musicians"?

For the same reason, it matters to me, as a musician, to note that their MVP is not heading in the direction of their claim.

If anything, I'm helping that project by consulting them on the product / giving user feedback on the design.

Because I care, and I don't want to see a development effort wasted on something that people won't use because the developers did not understand the needs of the people they are writing this program for.

>I hope you've enjoyed working on your songs, just like the authors of Meadowlark are enjoying working on this DAW.

Well I'm not posting my songs on HackerNews in a post saying "Background Music To Write Code To: By Programmers, For Programmers". That would be dishonest.

It makes sense, therefore, for musicians to comment on the discrepancy of something aiming to be a "fully featured DAW" without having the most basic feature (but shooting for advanced stuff few people need).