[spaceman_2020]

I don't think you can really squeeze out enough performance out of web browser for a full-fledged DAW.

One of my complete song can push even my Intel i9 to its knees on desktop. You're talking about dozens of MIDI tracks, dozens of audio tracks, several plugins...that requires heavy duty performance.

[filoleg]

What about the performance being backed by a beefy server machine, and web just being the (potentially collaborative) front-end for it?

Everyone works with the exact same environment. Accessible from any machine. The only concern is latency, and that will be a hard one to solve. But once it is solved, it could imo become the next big step forward for DAWs that completely changes the game.

[spaceman_2020]

Latency would be a huge problem. Anything over 30ms results in your timing being slightly off. Go above 60ms and recording audio becomes impossible.

On my desktop with Ryzen 5700x, 32GB Ram and a dedicated audio interface, I still get 11ms I/O latency (22ms combined) in Ableton. If I had to send this signal through a web browser to a server, I can’t see any scenario where I could keep this under 30ms. Beyond 30ms, the lag becomes noticeable.

It can work if you’re only working with MIDI tracks but any audio work requires absolutely the lowest possible latency

[disintegore]

It really depends on what you mean by "enough". If the native audio stack does the real heavy lifting, and the plugins are compiled to WASM, it'd probably be more than enough for most use cases. People were mixing digitally decades ago on much much slower machines than yours.