Why You Shouldn’t Write a DAW - David Rowland - ADC23
Published 2024-07-08
Why you shouldn’t write a DAW - David Rowland - ADC 2023
There are surprisingly few DAWs in the music making world, especially when compared to the number of audio plugins on the market. Why is this? Could it be that all the DAWs in existence are perfect and there’s no need for another one? Perhaps there’s another reason…
In this talk we dive behind the UI/UX to take a deeper look at the technology that underpins DAWs. We’ll take a tour of some of the problems they solve, often transparently to the user, and some of the technical concepts they have to navigate in order to keep music makers in the groove.
Finally, we look at what alternatives there might be if you want to build a product that looks a bit like a DAW and why not building from scratch might save you a lot of time and money.
Link to Slides:
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David Rowland
Dave Rowland is the CTO at Audio Squadron (owning brands such as Tracktion and Prism Sound), working primarily on the digital audio workstation, Waveform and the engine it runs on. Other projects over the years have included audio plugins and iOS audio applications utilising JUCE. In academia, David has taught on several modules at the University of the West of England on programming for audio. David has a passion for modern C++ standards and their use to improve code safety and brevity, has spoken at the Meeting C++ and Cpp On Sea conferences and is a regular speaker at the Audio Developer Conference and related monthly meetup. Past presentations: github.com/drowaudio/presentations/
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Streamed & Edited by Digital Medium Ltd: online.digital-medium.co.uk/
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Organized and produced by JUCE: juce.com/
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Special thanks to the ADC23 Team:
Sophie Carus
Derek Heimlich
Andrew Kirk
Bobby Lombardi
Tom Poole
Ralph Richbourg
Jim Roper
Jonathan Roper
Prashant Mishra
#adc #dsp #audio #daw
All Comments (10)
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the ai noise removal never fails to replace audience sounds and silence with the most devilish sounds ive ever heard lol
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lol i was just thinking of coding a daw for myself yesterday lol
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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.
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Thanks for sharing. Interesting stuff to understand
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Why... Because Bitwig is already out there.
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Very interesting and fact-filled, great!
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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.
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the audio file reading sounds like an interesting problem
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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.
