[ssharp]

"Most of the DAW interfaces often seem overcomplicated, and they only tend to get more and more bloated over time."

How much can you simplify the interface and still make it do everything producers want to do? Garageband simplified the interface quite a bit compared to Logic, but even that can get complicated and ultimately isn't as flexible as other DAWs.

I've been a fairly loyal user of Sonar and FL Studio for over a decade, largely out of habit because that's what I used when I first started and don't care to learn anything different. Especially with FL Studio, early versions of that were extremely simple. At it's core, it's still fairly simple, but allows you a lot of flexibility to do crazy things through automation.

Especially in EDM, the DAW has essentially become another instrument for creativity, so limiting that will limit the audience to those with lesser needs. I do think there is a big hole for a cross-platform DAW that's at least halfway decent, so this is exciting to see!

[archagon]

If you're an artist of sound and musical texture, then sure — a powerful DAW can't be replaced. But if you want to specifically focus on composition — harmony, melody, counterpoint — then a DAW becomes a looming, impenetrable fortress. In my experience, musical creativity thrives when you're able to iterate on your ideas in a rapid loop, adding and removing notes almost as quickly as you think of them. There is plenty of room in the music software landscape for tools that focus entirely on placing notes instead of generating production-quality sound.

In other words, your favorite Markdown editor doesn't replace Microsoft Word — but that's hardly the goal!

[jdietrich]

>There is plenty of room in the music software landscape for tools that focus entirely on placing notes instead of generating production-quality sound.

There's already an industry standard for that - Avid Sibelius. If you're composing in a traditional manner, a DAW probably isn't the right tool.

http://www.avid.com/sibelius

[archagon]

I've used Sibelius (and Finale) back in the day. For classical music, maybe it's indeed the right tool to use. But if you're writing modern music, with all its syncopation and irregularity, it's simply painful. Rests, dotted notes, and ties everywhere. Massive, piece-wide refactoring pains with even the smallest changes. Key signature horror. Obscure notation. Lack of true support for pitch bending and non-standard tunings. It's like trying to translate technical writing into a foreign language.

Classical notation was fantastic for use with pen & paper when music was much more conservative and on-the-beat. But we have computers now. We can come up with something better — whether it's software like StaffPad[1] as a first step or something even farther removed from classical paradigms.

I've also written a bit about this in my blog[2]. Frustration with classical notation was one of the reasons why I worked on my own "anti-DAW" music app. (Though it's a somewhat less ambitious project than Helio.)

[1]: http://staffpad.net

[2]: http://beta-blog.archagon.net/2016/02/05/composers-sketchpad...

[jdietrich]

As a Sibelius user and jazz musician who writes avant-garde music, I humbly disagree. Classical notation is my native language. It's an odd and idiosyncratic language, but it works. If you need musicians to understand what you've written, it's your only option. I can't read piano roll at tempo and I don't know anyone who can.

Sibelius has fairly good support for swing, shuffle and irregular meter. It has natively supported quartertones since version 6; plugins provide good support for alternative tunings and microtonal composition. Classical notation can get clumsy if you're doing really weird things, but "really weird" is a higher bar than you'd expect.

If you're using timbre as a fundamental expressive element, then a DAW is probably the right tool. At present, we have no useful system for notating synthetic timbres.

[stfnfhrmnn]

Sibelius and Finale used to be the industry standard, but there is a new kid on the block for music notation: Steinberg Dorico

Other new tools like Staffpad are amazing, but they serve a somewhat different market.

[jdietrich]

Dorico is clearly the future given Avid's shabby treatment of Sibelius users, but I'm not sure it's the present. It might just be inertia or switching costs, but Dorico hasn't been adopted by many composers yet. I haven't yet used the v1.1 update, but v1.0 was missing a lot of important features.

[tomxor]

It is possible to simplify the interface by reducing the number of tools without necessarily removing functionality.

The idea is to identify large sets of tools that can be replaced with a handful of powerful combinable tools to perform the same tasks - this is not always easy but if done well can end up not only simplifying UI but providing more powerful, intuitive tools and reducing unnecessary learning.

I think Modo has done this fairly well in this regard for 3D modelling and animation (programs which tend to be notoriously full of thousands of discrete tools).

This is not limited to DAWs. 3D animation packages, photo editing and video editing packages all historically have this problem... They grow these discrete tools to a large number, it increases the UI complexity, inevitably resulting in tons of stuff hidden under context menus and usually heavily resorting to mode based interfaces.

I had hoped this concept would become popular so that things like Photoshop and Illustrator could be simplified.

[Applejinx]

The trick is how much state you have to keep in your head. Something like Blender requires enormous state about even things like what key combinations mean in different contexts: it's a poster child for impossibly demanding state requirements.

Something like the Flash pen tool is much simpler, but still absolutely requires you to maintain some state: clicking versus click-dragging, remembering not to close a shape by simply clicking on a control point without also dragging out Bezier points. There are expectations before you can begin to flow with the thing.

I've been working hard on this concept using a Minecraft mod (Snowball Madness: http://www.airwindows.com/snowball-madness/ ) that suffered the same problem. I'd made countless 'effects' so it was nearly impossible to remember what did what.

After a drastic functionality-culling process, I began rebuilding things in line with a concept: generalizing. If you can place a block above a snowball and it places the block where the snowball hits, that's what it does, no exceptions. TNT used to spawn explosions just for silly fun, but it became 'place TNT block' altering the type of silliness. Pickaxes used to dig large holes in rock (in some cases, leaving ores hanging) so all the other tools got similar treatments: axes vanishing wood logs, shovels vanishing dirt, hoes turning grass/dirt into tilled farmland. Always trying to incorporate 'cheaty' ways of doing things but predictably so.

It's like the old Apple UI guidelines. The default expectation is that you can grope blindly towards a result and things do what you think they would do, allowing you to not think about the process.

[BaronSamedi]

How about coding a song instead? With the right language or DSL it should be possible. Substitute a Music IDE for the DAW, maybe keep some visualizations (synced to the code of course).

I suppose musicians are more comfortable with a visual metaphor. Still the over-the-top skeuomorphism doesn't seem that efficient to me compared to just coding it.

[kennywinker]

There are numerous examples of music programming languages. I imagine some people have some success with them, but I think they are not widely adopted because it lacks the immediacy and tight feedback loops available in DAW.

In a DAW, as you're playing the track, you crank the reverb knob until you hit the sweet spot.

In a music programming language you fiddle with values and re-compile repeatedly until you find the sweet spot, but even then it's hard to find because you can't remember if it's better this time you compiled or last time.

For musical coding to work, I think it needs a Bret Victor / Swift Playgrounds / Lighttable style IDE, and then... it starts to look a lot like a DAW, just with algorithms instead of a note grid or timeline.

[ssharp]

Some skeuomophic design makes more sends in DAWs, especially the mixer where you might be controlling it with an external controller.

That said, a lot of plugins and virtual instruments never left that world of design after most others moved on.

[bartread]

I think this is an interesting idea, and sounds cool in principle, but the problem is that many users wouldn't know how to combine components together to get the tools/effects/instruments they want, or wouldn't want to bother to learn. The point being that all you might achieve with this approach is to substitute one type of complexity for another, and so you'd still alienate potential users. Maybe different potential users.

Depending on the market segment you're after that might be OK though.

[jlarocco]

> It is possible to simplify the interface by reducing the number of tools without necessarily removing functionality.

Could you explain with an example?

I think what you're saying may be technically true, but not necessarily what most users want.

I'm most familiar with photo editing and retouching, and while the software can appear daunting, it all makes sense looking at it as a photographer and using it for a little while. I use both Capture One and DxO Optics for RAW processing and retouching, and I often read the forums forums for both, and I don't recall ever seeing complaints that there are too many options and tools.

[seltzered_]

FWIW, for the 2D graphics packages I'd argue Acorn has tried to do this in generating shapes where it has an interface letting one chain-together and re-arrange actions.

(shameless plug) I've tried taking the approach of making a plugin for existing tools (Sketch, Sketchup, Photoshop, etc.) to make accessing the large set of tools easier via touch gestures at https://thimblemac.com . It also tracks most-recently-used tools.

[sowbug]

You're describing the Unix philosophy. It's popular, but not in these domains.

[paulgerhardt]

I think the analogy is "In the music world, we have the choice between the equivalent of XCode or Visual Studio to compose - here's Atom."

[peterrudenko]

In fact, I was quite inspired by Sublime Text, but not Atom/Electron.

[badosu]

"There's vim as well: http://csound.github.io/"

[joemi]

Csound is more analogous to GCC than it is to Vim, though. I'd say something akin to Vim would be a tracker: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_tracker

[badosu]

Agreed, if PCM [0] is assembly, Csound certainly could be C.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulse-code_modulation

[MrLeap]

What's pure data in this analogy? https://puredata.info/ A hex editor?

[jancsika]

I'd imagine a hex editor for music would be like a chiptune tracker.

Pure Data's domain is digital signal processing, with an emphasis on sound. It's good for prototyping because one edits the signal graph, GUI, and event-triggered scripts in the same visual window using the same event loop.

So in a way it's good for building idiosyncratic little "musical hex editors": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rz1uNLHorEs

I say idiosyncratic because when you can connect anything to anything else, weird things start to happen. (For example, adding two more boxes to the diagram to control the crossfader with the pitch of someone's voice.)

[badosu]

Well, pure data is a 'higher-level' sound programming environment, so it could be emacs.

[vortico]

+1 Best analogy. The interface actually reminded me of emacs when I used to use PD.

[rhizome]

Out of curiosity, what did you graduate to?

[joemi]

I don't know about that. I think the visual programming aspect is the most defining trait, in which case...? I don't know any general purpose non-toy visual programming languages/interfaces. Scratch exists but likening PD to Scratch doesn't seem fair to me.

[MrLeap]

Its hard for me to think about it as high level when you're adding sine waves together to make sounds.

[badosu]

My only knowledge of PD is from graphical interfaces that implement components using it, so my assumption was that Csound was lower-level due to my (brief) experience writing on it.

[gglitch]

Eve. http://witheve.com/

[tripzilch]

> I do think there is a big hole for a cross-platform DAW that's at least halfway decent

well there's Renoise ( http://renoise.com ), which is IMHO, amazing.

it's just that, it's based on the old-school trackers paradigm (like Fast Tracker, Impulse Tracker, etc), which not everybody likes (but is actually a great fit for cutting up breakbeats and stuff that fit step-sequencer like workflows). Enhanced with support for VSTs, LADSPA etc (and built-in effects of course) and a sampler interface to design instruments that kinda blows the socks off just about anything.

so there's that. and I love it :)

but I do agree there's a big hole for a DAW with a good piano-roll and "stretchy" timelines like the arrangement view in Ableton. especially the way you can navigate the timeline by dragging on it left and right, but dragging up and down to zoom, such an intuitive way to navigate in sonic material where you often want to be able to zoom from hawks-eye overview to dive straight down and adjust some detail in the 10s of milliseconds, and back. I don't get why nobody has copied this way of navigation, it's IMHO right up there with ableton's timestretch/markers features that make it great. Yes Bitwig copied it, but that's partially Ableton's team.

Bitwig is crossplatform, btw. But I never could get it do what I wanted. But I had a sort of temporary/educational license which expired and wowww was that program ever completely useless in demo-version.

Speaking of that, it's the main reason why I started using Renoise. It was the only program that was even remotely useful in demo-version (just disabled export-to-wav and render-to-sample, inconvenient, but doesn't make the program useless, you can always record your sound in another way). Of course I got it licensed by now, having had way too much fun with it. It's only like 85 euros (including tax), compare to what you pay for Ableton nowadays, which doesn't even run on Linux.

Oh and we all know there's no "best" DAW, right? No shame in using multiple tools, each for which is best at what it does, and just bounce the audio through your OS audio framework (there's equivalents for JACK on Windows and Mac, right?)

[tomduncalf]

Both Bitwig and Tracktion are available cross-platform and are as capable as the competition (Bitwig being closer to the Ableton Live paradigm, Tracktion being more traditional). I guess the issue you might have on Linux is plugin support.

[sdnguyen90]

Can anyone explain why none of the major DAW's have a simple step sequencer like FL Studio's? From my observations, FL Studio has a fairly large user base and IMO the step sequencer is the only thing that sets it apart from other DAW's.

[kennywinker]

I'm not certain, but I suspect it's because step sequencers are a fairly limiting way of looking at melodies. I've not used FL Studio's but I've used many hardware step sequencers, and it's very hard to coax music out of them that doesn't feel very... grid-y? You don't get access to the kinds of nuance in terms of note start and note length that make performances sound human and not... sequenced.

I mean, basically all DAWs have a grid view where you can see notes on a grid and zoom in and out on that grid. If you zoom out to 1/16 notes, that's basically a step sequencer view... but then you can zoom in when you want to add 1/32 or 1/64 note complexity.