Why You Shouldn’t Write a DAW - David Rowland - ADC23

[@anwiseru9064]

the ai noise removal never fails to replace audience sounds and silence with the most devilish sounds ive ever heard lol

[@reverend11-dmeow89]

Audacity's Noise Reduction has had this capability since day-one.

[@tothejazz4828]

the absolute irony of these wacky ai artifacts in the context of an AUDIO CONFERENCE

[@zvotaisvfi8678]

LOL LAWL LOLL Soo FUNNY LOL IM LITERALLY LUAGHING RIGHT NOW LAAAAWL

[@benjiyork]

The irony

[@ivanknjezevic4840]

I really started to hate it. Now when you hear what kind of silly artifacts it creats, it makes you realize: what's wrong with audience noises leaking in the first place??

[@guaposneeze]

I think ADC23 has the highest hit rate of videos that make me go "I should really make time to watch that properly" of any ADC. It's gonna take me forever to get caught up, which will help me avoid writing a DAW for quite a while.

[@alexandrekharlamov150]

Come on, no youtube video ever stopped anyone from writing a DAW!

[@GoAwayStupidAI]

A fantastic worked example in requirements analysis and economic cost in software development. Thanks for sharing.

[@KingGrio]

This was a very compelling talk. I'm not an advanced programmer, I'm a system tester QA with programming skills, but not real-time programming skills. I'm also a musician and user of DAWs for my own music projects. I sometimes dream of building my own plugins or stomp boxes or music making environments (fledgling DAW) but then I see all the work that has to be put in just for things to run without artifacts and clicks and for the user to be empowered to click around freely and I can see the number of hours I'll have to invest to solve all these problems and not spend my time instead on making music or building the creative features that are closer to the music. And I get demotivated. I truly think that using Traktion as a starting base to get all that groundwork taken care of and dive directly into making unique features for my DAW is a great concept.

[@kisaragi-hiu]

Though I eventually ended up being a REAPER person (and used Ardour before that), Tracktion always has a special place in my heart. I might still come back to try it.

[@jakobole]

We have reached the peak of DAW's already. Just like with text-editors, photo-editors, and video-dittos - I mean, there are only so many ways you can edit / process / "record" the stuff, that if you add more features, it perhaps becomes counter-productive (I'm looking at you Ms - Word, for example)

[@perprerp]

Haha. No. We are in extremely early stages of software development. There's virtually unlimited capacity for expansion still. To think that software has peaked is completely absurd.

[@buckycore]

I think the innovation of a DAW would like for me is a DAW/Animation and/or video editing software combo where one can perfectly align the animation to midi notes beyond just the audio alignment. All video software has their own DAW-ish component, but it's for audio only and still in the traditional "use auto type sync feature for rough ball park" But I'm saying in my vision of the DAW/Animation/Video editor, the ability to sync things up would be exactly like Automating and modulating track and plugin parameters but with the visual portion as well

[@timeltdme4355]

it's possible to do some sound reactive video and/or "animation" in reaper video plugin

[@perprerp]

You can do this in DaVinci Resolve

[@philippkemptner4604]

When I bought my first midi only Cubase, I was so blown away. And from there things just felt like pure magic. What, we can do Harddisk recording now? We have third party effects now? Waves plugins don't even sound horrible? We have virtual instruments now? We have all that run on the processor now? We don't need expensive DSP cards any more? I was so impressed what coders made possible over the years and how easy life has become for us engineers. People who didn't have to work on desks like AMS Neve, edit on tape or rudimentary MOD recorders, timecode locking stuff, doing backups to tape drives and so on don't even know what you guys made possible.

[@MahlenMorris]

This makes me want to upgrade the DAW I use, just because that work list makes me sympathize with the devs.

[@NORBZMUSIC]

I built out a ton of audio production tools in my time, a few of them took off, one being a mini DAW that was built in flash. Little 16 track grid, piano roll, drum machine module, changeable grid, etc. I versioned it 5-6 times before deciding I want to convert it from flash/beginner tool into a full blown C+ daw. First programming team estimated 6months, took 1.5yrs before I scrapped it, he got stuck in C+ root level bugs for months at a time once the basics were built. Second programming team tried with Juce and by then I knew they were learning as they were building, had to cut the project again. I gave up shortly after and retired from music production tools after a final build out series for kontakt. In short = never again, in long = it was a great experience and quite lucrative. A full blown DAW is literally a never-ending build and a costly obsession of a business.

[@everybodyhasoul5438]

Really happy to have found this channel! Really dope talk. As a non-dev, I have a passion for the future of audio as a performer, educator, producer, and engineer. Hope to work in this field in some capacity in the future.

[@Atezian]

I glued to this the whole way through. Great stuff

[@lolilollolilol7773]

Nice breakdown of a devilish piece of software to write.

[@CypiXmusic]

I never wanted to build a daw in the first place. However as a user this talk really helps understand the developers when they drop new version and so on

[@offroaders123]

This is exactly what I have been looking to read up on, excellent!

[@maus3454]

Thanks for sharing. Interesting stuff to understand

[@VapidVulpes]

Hehehehe i watch a lot of tech talks, but this is the first one I've seen where i understood everything and had to tackle overcoming every single issue he brings up in real world situations for not only a purely digital environment, but also for all these things as it relates to linking tape machines and outboard gear into a system. Hehehehhe 🎉 such a fun talk! It's so cool to see the programming side of all these challengs laid out like this! So thankful for the community of coding cats helping overcome these hurdles so I can trust my software more and more with each new iteration 💜🥳

[@YoshiOST]

David Rowland is the waveform goat. 👏

[@richnorris1061]

Had that same thing happen to live vocal recording, as it turned out the odd sounds actually enhanced the songs :-) going to use some of the sounds in my live synth setup :-)

[@solarsound744]

excellent - exciting like a thriller

[@statebased]

One learning in developing these complex real time systems is to be lazy up to the "end", and from there build your output specific real time "renderer" (here in audio). A bit like a just in time compilation/interpretation of domain specific language. While complex, it cuts down on the overall effort needed.

[@savingcaustic]

Very interesting and fact-filled, great!

[@mkostya]

Highly interesting stuff

[@ClintMoody]

Ableton-style clips are coming to Waveform! Nice!

[@TehSyneS]

thank you!

[@AustrianSynthesizerSchool]

We invested 14 years to develop the Synthesizer Workstation DAW and now we give it away for free in the Windows store. This was only possible because the boss was a millionaire when he started the project and now he has enough idealism to keep his baby alive ;-)

[@dosesandmimoses]

Good luck- very esoteric

[@Chilliwilly91]

really interesting talk! who is the one person who knows what channel bussing is?

[@DjembeJimbo]

I just watched a 45 min ad fml-at least it was on 2x

[@machinate]

We really need to focus on utilitarianism in design; reinventing the wheel because it's "comme il faut" literally takes away work-hours from innovation.

[@musiqtee]

Good thought, it goes for most things - like food, housing or education…? Problem is that we are a market based economy. There’s little “market” to compete for by being utilitarian. So we base our work on what a market “wants”, not on what people may need… …and get frustrated by that work - how ironic…😅 More to the topic: A well produced piece of audio is now worth cents, not a fistful of dollars. Says me, studio worker since 1982 (a silly old fart, but not my fault…) 😂

[@mikolasstrajt3874]

And yet there are some crazy people who implement DAWs in their free time and those DAWs work surprisingly well.

[@starbrandX]

I've been having a great time in RipX Pro

[@beatskool101]

Why... Because Bitwig is already out there.

[@DjembeJimbo]

This 45 min ad makes me appreciate the bitwig development team tremendously

[@wrxnglove]

the world in which bitwig is open source is a beautiful place

[@SamHocking]

I agree, Bitwig is showing what a DAW can be when you let go of this whole linear 'lets create a Console in a PC'.

[@made.online2149]

And yet even it can't easily do the things that the in-development Blockhead can do ;)

[@anwiseru9064]

the audio file reading sounds like an interesting problem

[@Krmpfpks]

I am sure it was is not. The general problem might be interesting (dynamic caching, predicting what to read, multiple thread safe and block free read pointers etc) but as soon as you actually have to cope with the quirks of different file formats it gets ridiculously annoying and tedious.

[@albud2584]

And what about workflow? Unfortunately when looking at any DAW's users forum, it's full of discussions about workarounds and missing features complains. After 40 years, there isn't really one thought as an out-of-the-box creative instrument where external generic controllers are at the heart of it. Just a bunch of functions, mostly audio oriented for chaining loops on button press. Not my vision of making music... As a simple example, I can't find a DAW that allows me to make a one shot device controller mapping that then can be routed dynamically to duplicated instance with takeover support for CCs, to avoid jumps in values between instances. I sometimes wonder if these tools are really designed for musicians?

[@LWmusik]

I had an idea for a next gen minimalist DAW. Turns out I could just customize reaper to be like that anyway

[@binchsoda]

27:32 fun fact, Ableton doesn't do this, at least used not to, I remember many times when a pad sound was a bit early and wouldn't play until the next note starts

[@MarkT-v7f]

I personally feel Reaper has taken the DAW almost as far as possible - without trying to include too many native plugins (3rd parties can use more time/resources). Instead Reaper offers the most flexible, configurable platform out there. I am assuming that flexibility is important to you! You can natively change almost every aspect from GUI to functionality. It offers scripting tools so that you can build any function you can imagine and there is a large, engaged community that shares its innovations, it is CHEAP and it is blazingly fast - it is written mainly in C++. It is updated on average monthly, and has a tiny footprint. I find it hard to imagine what more you could do without changing the entire concept (which may be the next step).

[@markarca6360]

It looks like they took inspiration fron Ableton Live (based on the thumbnail).

[@Artek604]

So... what you're saying is I shouldn't bother trying Waveform? Got ya! ;)

[@xacolima8892]

"Put that one on the totalizer" is something someone would say after schooling someone😮

[@hadror13]

I would argue that the next revolution in daw will be in interface and interaction.

[@simonvetter2420]

32:15 Can someone in the know tell me what he means here with regards to channel busses and only one person in the world understanding them? Especially in the context of plugins, I have no idea what or who he's talking about.

[@philjay7986]

There is open source repos for almost everything, but any codebase related to audio production seems to be guarded secretly, at least to my perception…

[@relt_]

ok ill do it

[@ThulioFerrazAssis-hq2rf]

I wasn't planning on writing a DAW, and at minute 21 I was already convinced I will never want to write a DAW.

[@zvotaisvfi8678]

the future of the daw is a reel to reel with CD-RW tape

[@fklnd]

Well there are a lot of points why you should write a DAW: When you're interested to learn how all these things work together. There might even happen innovation. Also if you're building your own hardware sequencer you cannot avoid this deep diving in the concepts you have showed. But this is also part of the process of being or becoming an audio developer/designer call it what you want - whether in your studies or free time. But i get the point of the valid DAW-as-a-Service business model. Hopefully other DAWs don't jump onto that subscription based revenue model too soon aswell.

[@ross9263]

The laugh sound that someone filled in is hilarious

[@xcat4775]

all this talk is making me want to write a daw

[@nostalgia_junkie]

prayers for colugo

[@iluvyunie]

wrong, I have a track I'm working on and there's something bothering me about my main daw so I should reinvent the wheel to fix it over the course of 24 months of my free time so that I never have to get mad finalizing my project and can eventually just get back to the easy things obviously

[@QasarBeach2-pq5yv]

I think that QB took me around 2 years to create from scratch. build the audio, the ui, everything :/

[@DanJanTube]

you could make one of these for virtually any application

[@evennorthug2585]

How does AUv3 fit into this? It's Apple framework and largely visual, ok, but as technology, it's also the decomposing of the DAW, into plug-ins, in the form of plug-in apps. These flourish and already represent a plethora of creativity! The plug-in requires a running DAW to plug into. With a plug-in at every joint in the DAW internal chain, and protocols were to evolve, the 'backbone' role of the DAW could be challenged.

[@ruffylerare]

Image-Line: hold my beer.

[@tonal.states]

This makes me appreciate the REAPER devs way more, only 2 people for a lightweight fully customizable beast of a software? Damn!

[@niamhleeson3522]

This sounds like a nightmare. I'm a huge M so maybe writing a DAW will be my next project.

[@moonstrobe]

Yet, somehow, new DAWs just keep cropping up. Some of them truly open source, without any license fees attached.

[@foodforthegods]

When a CEO talks about a lack of "economic incentives" I have to wonder if they talk about a comfortable living wage for their employees and themselves, or if they think about buying a boat or three.

[@Oglokoog]

ImageLine innovates plenty

[@alexandrekharlamov150]

Well, the price can be lower if the development happens in a country where the food and housing prices are closer to their cost prices.

[@OMNICHROMATICA]

How come a audio card can't do the same thing a graphics card? Meaning how come graphics cards help graphics look better and run smoother but sound cards do not?

[@lesterfalcon1350]

38:55 'all of these are pretty essential, apart from maybe you don't want midi' That's not a DAW in my opinion, without midi. It's a digital multitrack.

[@TheQxY]

Why was my comment deleted? Again: Bitwig's modulator system is innovative. Other than that check out blockhead. It inteoduces the idea of rendering out effects in the arranger. The arranger is not real-time, so why not just render out all effects automatically on the fly?

[@bloodaid]

This is just propaganda to minimize DAW competition 🗣🔥

[@ChainsawCoffee]

"Why you shouldn't write a NEW DAW" is the real title. Yes, it takes architecture. Yes, it takes development. And to make money you have to give it time and marketing. _And it has to give a better user experience._ What has been described here is competent software development. Over time, software becomes crufty, and it needs to be rewritten. And what people want to innovate is a DAW that doesn't drive you mad. So yes, there is a real need for new DAWs.

[@SoundAuthor]

The main problem I have with almost all DAWs is they will inevitably become bloated with SO many features that the creative process starts to feel like sifting through an ocean of options. Since DAW developers are incentivized to shove more and more options into their software, this seems like an unavoidable outcome for almost every DAW you can think of.

[@timeltdme4355]

reaper is very good at keeping minimal UI while having tons of action scripts ready

[@BimBomPetrovich]

Most of these DAW engine problems can be solved with dynamic graphs and DAGs. It's just the audio guys only who don't love normal ways of solving CS problems

[@MrBrax]

It's a shame there's no good free daw out there

[@Linguae_Music]

Cockos can do it, they update reaper like every 2 days... and you can legit just email them if there is a bug and it'll usually be fixed in a few days. And the download for reaper is only 15mb for the entire DAW. It has more capabilities than every other DAW, except for maybe bitwig. And the free "trial" never expires... lack of innovation is not for lack of profit - Or Reaper wouldn't exist. I think people just overcomplicate things, and like to make excuses.

[@earthhuman5448]

AKAI, WE'RE LOOKING AT YOU! 😡

[@SoRusted]

how about don't support midi and plugins and an interface, that is like less than a year

[@Anders01]

My guess is that the next generation of DAWs will be based on AI. And instead of AI being added to existing DAWs I believe the new generation will start as simple AI music apps and then grow into more and more powerful DAWs.

[@josielewis3258]

Nonsense. The lack of innovation is because the audio companies kill any new innovation that might threaten their bottom line. I could use a DAW in 2009 and it did more for me than anything currently available because of the deliberate roadblocks put in place by programmers who make these excuses. It's very siimple. Provide something that just works. Don't handicap it unnecessarily so a producer or composer has to buy yet another piece of hardware just to get the correct ASIO layer to make the software work. it should work with the bare minimum of peripherals. This is all possible and was possible with the proper programming only 10 years ago, so why is it so difficult to build on the foundation that was already established back then? The wheel doesn't have to be reinvented every version. It just has to be improved or made compatible with the latest OS changes. That's it. The basic building blocks have always been there for decades. This is not rocket science. The way DAWs have been handled lately is the same as if the console companies had forced video game emulation software developers to handicap their own code so the user had to go out and by an extra piece of unneccessary USB hardware just to use the emulator, when the code was already there to provide a work around that doesn't need something like that. Do better, then maybe customers will reward the software companies with the financial incentive they expect. Enough with the escuses. Take Melodyne for instance. In 14 years, the finctionality has not really improved that much and it's still prone to crashes that should have been eliminated 10 years ago. That's a lazy developer problem, not a customer problem.

[@MrKrisstain]

A talk about writing doors. "Why You Shouldn't Write a Door"

[@NeZversSounds]

Check out Colugo Blockhead (DAW) Mindblowing and innovative music creation.

[@claudiojulioferraz]

If Ableton ported Note to Android, we wouldn't need anything else.

[@D-Ogi]

41k views and only 10 comments? What's going on 🤔

[@DaMaster1983]

i built a daw :)

[@monostate6629]

Why you should write a DAW.

[@theinvisibleman-e8v]

Testing and QA doesn’t cost much as the end users are the suckers who alpha/beta test the thing.

[@DaMaster1983]

if you shared sources it would not cost so much and would be easy to make

[@rafaelkhan_]

...I just wanna know who the person is who understands channel busses....

[@Momentvm]

Because you won't need anything else than Reaper

[@luciwaves]

Holy mother of God... so many issues 😫

[@gloom303]

The AI noise removal is absolute nightmare fuel. Like, it makes the entire video almost unwatchable. The irony of an audio developer conference video not previewing their own audio productions before publishing.

[@neol07707]

if you believe the hype in AI then generative AI will be able to create a daw from scratch

[@reverend11-dmeow89]

Plz Time is NOT Immutable Please get that concept in or DAW remains THE ORIGIN of the abysmal productions foe the past four decades, since waypoint/mile marker MPU-401. MIDI 2.X is Mandatory or no sale.

[@literal-jk]

I CANT HEAR YOU NANANNANANANANNANA

[@Drew_Vernon]

The next DAW will create music for you, requiring no talent. It will be replete with AI tools, MIR infused utilities, all informed by huge datasets. And I have zero interest in that world.

[@eklipseRomania]

I completely agree with you. But I would also like to add that the next "good" DAW will probably be something more simple and topical, maybe similar to the vertical trackers of bygone eras. For example, some young people compose from their bedroom and are specialized on 1-2 genres, so a lot of them are 1. not using most of a daw's features, 2. don't have tons of money and 3. tend to get lost in the overwhelming amount of information in the modern DAW, so I believe there is a real niche out there for cheap specialized tools. There's one developer, not gonna name names, that specialize in very specific plugins for Rave, Trance and Psy. How would a hyper-specialized DAW look like? Would bedroom producers pay 60$ for such a product when Reaper is out there? Who knows? But it would be interesting to find out.

[@squelchedotter]

The whole AI industry will crash and burn long before then lol

[@exitthelemming145]

If the music of the future is to be innovative and original, it will not necessarily be created by musicians but by people with imagination and sufficient irreverence towards the available technology to have it do what it wasn't designed to.

[@dirg3music]

Well said, and I feel like that is exactly the soul-less future we are staring down the barrel at. I wash my hands of that nonsense, I'll be just fine with a "boring", traditional, DAW thank you very much. Lol

[@DoctorMandible]

As though popular music today has so much humanity?

[@quantum_ocean]

See Blockhead daw

[@partymarty6969]

There’s only a few DAWs ?? Naw, we have enough tools for music production. We need more innovation in the Touring & Music Retail side of things. Your recordings have never sounded better, give it a rest LOL!

[@chrisoctane]

40 minute advert for Tracktion Engine masquerading as a dev talk. SMH

[@timeltdme4355]

happy to read this comment section before watching the video

[@samiryi4728]

Please, let's ditch digital audio as we know it all together - these are concepts coming from A/D and D/A conversion chips and old telephony systems.

[@rawvoxel]

Lmao this isn't game dev, who the hell honestly wants to write a DAW?

[@vadimmartynyuk]

Cubase is the best DAW with the worst GUI

[@timeltdme4355]

a "workstation" with bad GUI can't be good

[@BloodyCactus]

talking about stability by tracktion dudes.. hilarious! waveform gets worse and worse with every major release lol, it has become pure garbage.

[@LinkFromCdi]

skill issue