imo 3D graphic software is still in stone age. In modern DAW you can create professional sounding track in few hours even in minutes (depends on a genre). 3D software require A LOT of effort and time to get professional results.v1o wrote: Sun Sep 01, 2019 8:10 pm Most of the major DAWs have remained largely unchanged for the past ten years with no real innovation. I was reading up on the latest versions of Autodesk Maya and Blender. The amount of new features, functions and technological progress that has been made within just a couple of years is staggering. In terms of computer science these applications are really pushing bar of what is possible in software.
I know this might sound silly to some but when compared to the speed of innovation in the market for 3d animation software & renderers, music production software is in the stone age. DAWs for example have stuck rigidly to the piano roll metaphor when composing, whereas in the aforementioned there are dozens of different but equally valid methods to create (model or animate) content. They have also made huge progress in high quality procedurally generated content to speed up workflows. And almost everything is scriptable and customizable. Even freeware like Blender is a much more complex piece of software than Cubase or Logic; with an order of magnitude more tools, functions, macros, modules, settings, user customizable workflows etc etc. I'm also shocked that physics based interactions have not made their way into Audio yet - such as using real physics to model sound vibrations in different environments rather than the hacks commonly used in most delay based fx.
Audio software doesn't change that much because we reached point when not much can be changed. We have tools which are based on decades of experience starting from the first multitrack recorder. It simply works. Of course there's space for experimental software/techniques but it doesn't change the fact that actual audio software is simply greatly usable as it is. Why piano roll is still here? Because it works and is efficient for the task.
3D graphic software? It's still very young tech there's a ton of space for improvement to speed up workflow and this is why there's a lot of innovation - because there's a lot to improve.
Your comparison based on complexity totally makes no sense and is illogical. Different tools for different tasks (not to mention that modern DAWs like Cubase are very complex and has already more tools than majority of musicians/prodocers need). I think that you never went deep into any of those DAWs and your opinion is based just on looking at the surface. You can't compare both. Actually it's not different than comparison of 3D software and MS Word.
Physics based models are still very fresh in audio (and very simple) because it require a lot of processing power. Audio in opposite to 3D graphics doesn't use accelerators because it's absolutely different architecture and different requirements for both audio and graphics. We will get there but for now real-time processing power of CPU's barely can handle big multitrack sessions. Some use server systems to just run their sessions in real-time. How many musicians/producers can afford that? Not many. Thus nobody is running to do R&D to release 3D physics based audio modelling in commercial market. Bah look at Acustica Audio. Their approach is kinda innovative yet still very 'simple' yet their effects can eat even newest CPUs like a candy.
If we get powerful audio accelerators like NVIDIA/AMD do for graphics then I'm sure that it would give a huge boost to experiments and R&D. But it will not happen. Music/audio is de-evaluated (more and more each year) while market for 3D graphics growing bigger and bigger. Just look at the demand differences for graphic designers and audio designers (not to mention salary gap) for film/video game companies. There's much more money in graphics than in audio. Thus less money being put into audio software/hardware.
[EDIT] for example in UE4 we're getting new tools which allow us to process 3D spatial audio, obstructions etc. based on 3D world physics. It's really cools stuff yet implementation of eg. reverberation there is very simple and far from high quality like reverbs that we can use in DAW (not to mention hardware). I've never been in such situation but I can imagine that many times when sound designers will want to use it, later someone will ask them to abandon this idea because... there's a need for those precious CPU cycles for graphics/code processing to keep good FPS. Oh well... once again audio is less important than graphics
Ps. Maybe 3D software have 10000000000 tools and functions. But is it really a sign of superiority over audio software? Maybe it's actually opposite. There's so many tools and functions because it's still a long way to simplify/speed up an entire production process. More not always equals better.
