DAW software lags behind other creative software like 3D animation packages

[mgw38]

Forgive the pedantry, but the actual translation of the Latin is 'the exception tests the rule,' not proves the rule. In fact, an exception would invalidate the rule, wouldn't it?

Very strictly speaking, an exception cannot invalidate a rule because with the invalidation of the rule it ceases to be an exception. The mere existence of an exception require the existence of a rule. My Latin is a bit rusty but I think that is how Cicero meant it. It was a legal argument and not a scientific one.

[v1o]

Speaking as somebody who started his career in Computer Graphics research and is now overseeing an internationally recognized animation and game design program, this boost in development on the 3d production side is not completely unexpected. Real time graphics is still a very active academic research area. Computer graphics technology is still a hot computer engineering field. Just as an example, real time ray tracing on consumer level computers was completely unthinkable just a few years ago. Now it is more or less almost standard. The software world needs to innovate at the same rate in order to stay competitive. You simply don't have that on the audio side.

You said it much better than I could. Development on the audio side is at a snails pace compared to what happening with graphics software. Maybe academic research in audio doesn't enough funding?

[mgw38]

Speaking as somebody who started his career in Computer Graphics research and is now overseeing an internationally recognized animation and game design program, this boost in development on the 3d production side is not completely unexpected. Real time graphics is still a very active academic research area. Computer graphics technology is still a hot computer engineering field. Just as an example, real time ray tracing on consumer level computers was completely unthinkable just a few years ago. Now it is more or less almost standard. The software world needs to innovate at the same rate in order to stay competitive. You simply don't have that on the audio side.

You said it much better than I could. Development on the audio side is at a snails pace compared to what happening with graphics software. Maybe academic research in audio doesn't enough funding?

Well, to be honest, there is no real need for any research that would have an impact on consumer level audio. From a technical perspective, anything that needs to be know is already known. At least that is our current understanding.

[DJ Warmonger]

I observe significant improvement in DAWs in past years.

Still, the one major breakthrough was Orb Composer - which actually creates useful music out of thin air. Unfortunatelly, it's a novelty project from small team, full of bugs. Despite good concept and overall simplicity it's still far from one-click solution.

It is probably true that the money play big role in that - there's just not enough market to win that would justify investing into latest and greatest tech. A safe business model is to just sell an abundance of sample packs and extensions - just "more of the same".

[v1o]

What currently happens when you bounce a project in a DAW is equal in quality to the world of 3D rendering when you have a realtime preview of your scene, but no one seriously expects this to be what you see at the movies!

For photorealistic CG mixed in with live action, maybe, but actually its not going to be long before you start to see realtime rendering on TV shows etc, especially pure-animation projects. We're already well past the quality required.

2015:


2016 :


2018:


2019:

Have you seen this UE4 demo? What interests me is realtime path tracing even though it's still not up to the quality of Hollywood productions.

BTW, Autodesk: 8.800 employees. The biggest player in the business, Steinberg, has 180 employees. according to their website. That's a massive difference.

Could you imagine Cubase with 1,000 active developers? Labour is super cheap in China I'm sure they could farm out development there.

Blender was first released 21 years ago... it's taken almost 20 to bring it's GUI up to modern standards. Maxon, developers of Cinema 4D for example were able to do that and get all the foundation stuff done in just 7..yet the Blender Foundation are still trying to get these basics tied up quickly for the 2.8 iterations.

To be fair it's a monumental achievement for a free open source application to be able to make Hollywood production quality assets or to even be considered by major studios such as Ubisoft. 2.8 has a lot going for it including the comprehensive 2D animation tools, Eevee and the updated Cycles renderer which is as good as Vray.

[Grumbleweed]

people doing video expect to be rendering for hours at a time.
i doubt musicians would do that for a reverb?

We used to. I remember going for a walk while Acid Pro rendered final mixes (about 15 years back).

You should go back and see if it's done now. 15 years is a long time to render a mix.

Grum.

[mgw38]

Btw, there are a few radical innovations in DAW related technology that have the potential to become precursors of technological disruption, but most of them are either driven by advances in 3d production (such as Dear VR Spatial Connect) or in AI (Orb Composer, etc).

[telecode]

Speaking as somebody who started his career in Computer Graphics research and is now overseeing an internationally recognized animation and game design program, this boost in development on the 3d production side is not completely unexpected. Real time graphics is still a very active academic research area. Computer graphics technology is still a hot computer engineering field. Just as an example, real time ray tracing on consumer level computers was completely unthinkable just a few years ago. Now it is more or less almost standard. The software world needs to innovate at the same rate in order to stay competitive. You simply don't have that on the audio side.

You said it much better than I could. Development on the audio side is at a snails pace compared to what happening with graphics software. Maybe academic research in audio doesn't enough funding?

What are you on about? When I was a kid your age and started in this journey, the recording studio, control room and effects where big bulky things that had to fit into a room that were about 10' x 15' or so. Today they all can fit into a glass plate that is about 1/4" x 10" and can be thrown into a backpack and that thing has more functionality than what was found in some recording studios in 90s. There has been lots of progress.

[chk071]

BTW, Autodesk: 8.800 employees. The biggest player in the business, Steinberg, has 180 employees. according to their website. That's a massive difference.

Could you imagine Cubase with 1,000 active developers? Labour is super cheap in China I'm sure they could farm out development there.

1. You can't compare manual labour with programming. Programmer jobs are surely a lot better paid in China. After all, all the smartphone manufacturers employ a lot of programmers as well.

2. You won't get 1.000 developers to work for Steinberg. What for anyway? And where should the experience with audio applications come from, that Steinberg and its employees gathered from 30 years of DAW development.

Most importantly, it'd be absolutely pointless, even if you could get the same amount of skills and experience, which you can't. Running a business always requires some cost benefit calculation, and i can't imagine that paying out in any way.

I don't think there's any "solution" (to which "problem" anyway?). DAW's are what they are, because the business is what it is. I see much more development in hardware devices, which obviously is also the more fun thing for people, and the area where they want to see innovation.

[mgw38]

DAWs are at the tail end of a technological disruption that has pretty much stabilized. There is some comfort to that. Constantly having to catch up with the latest technology can be exhausting and counterproductive to the creative process.

[v1o]

Speaking as somebody who started his career in Computer Graphics research and is now overseeing an internationally recognized animation and game design program, this boost in development on the 3d production side is not completely unexpected. Real time graphics is still a very active academic research area. Computer graphics technology is still a hot computer engineering field. Just as an example, real time ray tracing on consumer level computers was completely unthinkable just a few years ago. Now it is more or less almost standard. The software world needs to innovate at the same rate in order to stay competitive. You simply don't have that on the audio side.

You said it much better than I could. Development on the audio side is at a snails pace compared to what happening with graphics software. Maybe academic research in audio doesn't enough funding?

What are you on about? When I was a kid your age and started in this journey, the recording studio, control room and effects where big bulky things that had to fit into a room that were about 10' x 15' or so. Today they all can fit into a glass plate that is about 1/4" x 10" and can be thrown into a backpack and that thing has more functionality than what was found in some recording studios in 90s. There has been lots of progress.

Maybe if you lived in a vacuum and only compared to antiquated workflows in the old 4-track recording studios. Then maybe you could say there is progress. But in other ways sound quality has taken a step back, there is still analogue equipment in many mastering studios with fidelity beyond what you get with VSTs.

But anyway my main point is that compared to 3d graphics software there is not much development in DAW software. Stuff like Maya and 3DS Max is leaps ahead of all the DAWs out there.

[CasualHobbyist]

@ inkwarp (to an extent whyterabbyt): No software is perfect. Sure, you can reach full feature, but there is never a "plateau", if there was, why improve it? why make it different? or make it better?, granted, the last time I tried Photoshop was a few years ago with their most recent iteration. I remember having the software being a little on the unstable side, it would sometimes crash during a project and that wasn't the best ideal, of course that isn't to say that it couldn't have improved or gotten better since then. But I did heard that a low of raw or beta updates are pushed out constantly and those may not have the biggest stability out there, at least that's how I felt.

Of course this was just my impression back then (And also a few problems with how the licenser behaved, I never got to hear if they resolved that issue, probably not), and my natural distrust to software that works like subscription didn't yield the best impressions on me. I should have however clarified that those problems may not have happened to everyone or perhaps just a small (maybe medium-sized?) amount of people depending on the updates. My point with that argument was that just because is the most used doesn't always mean is the "best" (like I showed with Pro Tools), admittedly, I should have worded it out better though.

My bad for not making my words clear enough. Well, aside from that and going back to the topic at hand. 3D modeling seems to have advanced quite well and since a lot of money is poured into research of computing for those I think that's why is seen as something that has gotten quite "hot" when it comes to the research community alone. They are also extremely collaborative I can see, there doesn't seem to be many (if any) "but me!" approaches when it comes to this, like some DAWs have done. Then again, they are different areas altogether

[jah77]

I honestly would find it interesting if you noted down what advances you have in mind, unless you want the industry to come up with the concrete ideas. I think it should be very detailed notes, i.e. text describes a feature in DAW 1, compares it to DAW 2, explains the differences between both things, and comes along with diagrams and/or pseudo code. Not that there isn't any of this yet, but I see no reason to stop writing it down. Music is fun, so why not try to reason about the tools.

I have always had a project in mind that is only about finding what the better DAW could be. That would be only an open and free website, where - in a mind map or top-down form - collaborating website visitors would note down features in a standardized language and pleasing environment, finding the common subsets of nomenclature for DAWs (e.g. channel, track, stripe, part) and doing their best to describe what makes the ideal approach for a task and the part in the software that helps at it. You may compare it to reviewing DAWs, but I'd rather call it an open requirements documentation. Just viewing parts of the internet as a requirements fund isn't the same.

Sadly, a "wish list" without code is still something that would not attract many. But on the other hand it's still better than a software project that does not have a road map in the first place. The road map is the whole point here. The problem is just, that I myself would associate an "open requirements page" with unwillingness and missing collaboration. There's no money in the game.

[inkwarp]

Main problem is Adobe themselves, mostly. New enterprise licensing system is f**ked, will f**k you too.

i don't know what that means.
the OP is referring to technological innovation, not their pricing model or economic issues.

As an actual software package, yeah, what problems?

Yes, what problems? i have used photoshop for several years and for me it is probably the most solid software i can think of. as i stated, it does everything i could wish for my work. i can't speak for others but i believe their is good reason that it is still by far and away the best in it's field. i had work using when there weren't even layers in it, but when layers were added i got a much better job.

(Though if someone is doing 3D, then why they're still thinking 'Photoshop' rather than 'Substance Painter' is beyond me)
[/quote]

I "do a bit" of 3d and i have never used Photoshop for mapping. although if i did i am sure it would be capable.

[telecode]

Speaking as somebody who started his career in Computer Graphics research and is now overseeing an internationally recognized animation and game design program, this boost in development on the 3d production side is not completely unexpected. Real time graphics is still a very active academic research area. Computer graphics technology is still a hot computer engineering field. Just as an example, real time ray tracing on consumer level computers was completely unthinkable just a few years ago. Now it is more or less almost standard. The software world needs to innovate at the same rate in order to stay competitive. You simply don't have that on the audio side.

You said it much better than I could. Development on the audio side is at a snails pace compared to what happening with graphics software. Maybe academic research in audio doesn't enough funding?

What are you on about? When I was a kid your age and started in this journey, the recording studio, control room and effects where big bulky things that had to fit into a room that were about 10' x 15' or so. Today they all can fit into a glass plate that is about 1/4" x 10" and can be thrown into a backpack and that thing has more functionality than what was found in some recording studios in 90s. There has been lots of progress.

Maybe if you lived in a vacuum and only compared to antiquated workflows in the old 4-track recording studios. Then maybe you could say there is progress. But in other ways sound quality has taken a step back, there is still analogue equipment in many mastering studios with fidelity beyond what you get with VSTs.

But anyway my main point is that compared to 3d graphics software there is not much development in DAW software. Stuff like Maya and 3DS Max is leaps ahead of all the DAWs out there.

I don't feel that's true at all. I use and have used current versions of Cubase, FL Studio and Ableton and compare them to old versions of Logic , Cubase and Cakewalk that I used to use before. The current versions are miles more advanced.