Is there a workflow that only uses open file formats and protocols?

[BONES]

evidence required

Why? Whilst teh statement is clearly a gross generalisation, it should be fairly self-evident that you can't open a Cubase project in Ableton Live or Logic Pro. Artists don't provide remix kits that are just the bundled project from whichever DAW they used to create the original. The effort required to get my bandmate's Cubase projects across to Studio One is considerable but while he's happy to do it, I'll keep using S1. But if he ever gets jack of it, I'll probably move back to Cubase because it's more scut work than I'd be willing to do to keep the collaboration alive.

The Bitwig developers are working on an open exchange format called DAWproject:

That's Bitwig and Presonus, so you'd expect it will at least allow those two DAWs to work side-by-side. And it if works for two DAWs as different as those, you'd have to think it could easily work for any of 'em.

[30pinsimms]

The format I use, render to audio/export stems, works 100% of the time with every DAW on the market.

[whyterabbyt]

evidence required

Why? Whilst teh statement is clearly a gross generalisation, it should be fairly self-evident that you can't open a Cubase project in Ableton Live or Logic Pro.

Reread the part I highlighted, please. The assertion was that 'collaboration between users of different software does not work out'. Being able to open a project or not isnt the be-all and end-all of all collaboration.

The effort required to get my bandmate's Cubase projects across to Studio One is considerable but while he's happy to do it

There you go, that's the answer to your 'why?'. Your own process seems to be evidence that collaboration between users of different software can work out.

[mystran]

Wav & midi files are good for exchanging some raw data. For linear time daws & projects at least.

Daws that work with loops & clips have issues exchanging data that way.

Until you realise: a linear time project is the same as a clip-bases project, but it contains just one segment of 4 minutes long.

So the exchange format should support clips, snippets, loops etc in order to cover most territory.

Until you realize that a standard WAV file can store well known chunks to store cue-markers ("cue "), pitch information ("smpl") and loops ("loop") .. and "acid" chunks are also pretty commonly supported.

So.. if we have two pieces of software with decent support for .WAV we can absolutely do something like take a breakbeat, slice it into individual hits in one program, save a .WAV and expect to be able to trigger those individual beats in another program when we load the file.

Now, I do realize that in practice the level of support for such things varies from software to software.. but like that isn't really a fault of the format.. the boring old .WAV in particular is quite versatile.

ps. Obviously having to decompose your project into pieces and then rearrange those pieces on the other side is way less convenient than just being able to load a project file directly.. but it's really not THAT bad unless you're actively trying to use both pieces of software at the same time. I'd actually argue that in many cases, exporting individual pieces is actually more flexible than trying to constrain yourself into a "grand unified file format" that implements some least common denominator of features across a bunch of different software with different goals.

[BONES]

I just realised that Presonus snuck DAW Project into the 6.5 update for Studio One and that Bitwig support is also in that product. You can see how it works here -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymdK5YyhO7k&t=185s

It's open source so any other developer who wants to can add support to their DAW, too. It will be interesting to see who actually bothers.

[VOODOO U]

The format I use, render to audio/export stems, works 100% of the time with every DAW on the market.

Exactly. Why the f**k anyone needs to make things more difficult shouldn't be collaborating.