Which DAW Has The Most Uncluttered Interface ?

[BONES]

I also found it a boring environment to work in.

Boring? Boring is good because it means the application is getting out of your way so you can work. When Live was first released, I thought I'd love it's UI but I found it very difficult to work with and nothing has really changed in 20 years from that point of view. But Live is a completely different way of working, one that I really don't like at all, so it could have the greatest UI in the history of mankind and I still wouldn't want to use it. And, like Bitwig, development heads in a direction that makes it less and less desirable for me over time. All of which means that if you prefer Live, it's got f**k-all to do with the GUI.

Someone said all apps are functional tools. Its a bad take. Apps have character, opinions & energy encapsulated within, they reflect the cultures of the people who make them. There's subjective but valid reasons why one might inspire you, while another might feel like it antagonizes you somehow. It's interpersonal, between your proclivities and those of the people who made it.

Or maybe it's about productiveness and any given application will facilitate a workflow that works for you or it won't? Studio One works for me because "studio". I like the mixer-centric approach I can use in Studio One because it has allowed me to develop a workflow that feels, at least a little bit, like working in a physical studio, where the mixer is the centre of everything you do. That's obviously the market Presonus are going for, where Live is about dance music, which is a fundamentally different approach.

[jancivil]

I've literally never had a thought like that, 'here are a thousand menu entries, this is clutter'. I have things I'm trying to do and I can see what it all is in Key Commands window, and regardless of any of it my workflow is simple and streamlined, I get right to work. In the clunky, bloated, unintuitive clutter, somehow. It looks like a good excuse for not being busy with the thing the DAW does to me. Sorry, that's judgmental, yeah.

[BONES]

I kind of agree with you but I think that you do need to set things up for the way you work. The default layout of Cubase and Studio One is definitely full of clutter for my workflow but closing a few panels I don't need, like the inspector and the browser, frees up a lot of space for the more important stuff and reduces clutter considerably. For me, it's only clutter if it's something I don't need, yet I still have to deal with it.

[pinki]

I don’t use it any more, but Digital Performer’s GUI always felt peaceful and effective.
I’m on Studio One these days and I have mixed feelings about the GUI. I wouldn’t say it’s exactly peaceful, but it is efficient.

[Abiah]

I also found it a boring environment to work in.

Boring? Boring is good because it means the application is getting out of your way so you can work.

i think the term boring isnt serving the point your triyng to make. Transparency, as a workflow sensation, is what you're describing. That the tool doesnt ask for your attention, that it moves itself out the way wherever possible, that you can see and push through it's own surface, and feel directly connected into the material (music).

Some tools set out to achieve this, others arent well suited. I get this sensation quickly with pro tools, it's so plain and functional, it's like its not there. Logic X succeeds because it's aiming at this.

I never had this tool-transparency with S1, Reaper, Cubase or Logic 9. They always felt too present, in the way, friction, cluttered, often visually dull.

Boring can be bad. Boring can visually drab, and that drabness starts to transfer over to the feel of making music. It can also come from the friction of repeating the same dull task repeatedly (eg midi editing in Live). These environments all transfer over to the process of making music, to a subtle degree.

There's a reason why people put a priority on making their studio rooms inspiring and pleasant places to work in, right? The aesthetics of the environment affects the process. The digital space we stare into for thousands of hours is an aesthetic environment, it exerts some influence.

Or maybe it's about productiveness and any given application will facilitate a workflow that works for you or it won't?

This is totally in accordance with the point im making too. There's no either/or between our points.

I've literally never had a thought like that, 'here are a thousand menu entries, this is clutter'. I have things I'm trying to do and I can see what it all is in Key Commands window, and regardless of any of it my workflow is simple and streamlined, I get right to work. In the clunky, bloated, unintuitive clutter, somehow. It looks like a good excuse for not being busy with the thing the DAW does to me. Sorry, that's judgmental, yeah.

Idk you obv so dont take it personally, just like you dont know my work rate so i wont take your assertion personally.
Here's mine, and it's worth considering.
Some people have very little aesthetic sensitivity. They just dont care about it, or feel it much. They still make music, and why not. But I think that affects their music. Discussions like these will seem like nonsense to them them.

Personally, I know people who make music who have next to no aesthetic consideration in their music at all. I know people who make music software who also make the most messy unfocused music. I'm sure most of us know people like this. They enjoy making music, but honestly i dont really know who enjoys listening their music. And i dont know if they make the best decisions about user interfaces & user experience.

edited for clarity & typos

[antic604]

Someone said all apps are functional tools. Its a bad take. Apps have character, opinions & energy encapsulated within, they reflect the cultures of the people who make them. There's subjective but valid reasons why one might inspire you, while another might feel like it antagonizes you somehow. It's interpersonal, between your proclivities and those of the people who made it.

+1

[BONES]

Boring can visually drab, and that drabness starts to transfer over to the feel of making music.

Only if you let it. I used to put so much effort into how things looked - I must have made half-a-dozen full skins for Orion over the years, each requiring hundreds of hours of work, but the ones I kept coming back to were the most practical designs, not the prettiest. And often the two things work against each other - in an effort to make something more appealing, you can easily compromise its utility. I'd always prefer a tool erred on the side of practicality, not visual appeal.

There's a reason why people put a priority on making their studio rooms inspiring and pleasant places to work in, right?

I dunno, mine has always been about utility - getting everything set up where I can get at it easily. Again, it is something I put a lot of time, effort and money into. e.g. a couple of months ago I spent three solid weekends just working out different set-ups on my new keyboard stand for the next time we play live. I also spent a couple of hundred bucks on new cables, ties and shelving material to make it all work. The inspiration comes from seeing it all set up and knowing that it will work, not from anything around it.

All that said, I did notice a couple of weeks ago, when looking through the Studio Pics thread, how many people hang their guitars and stuff on the walls around their studios. I thought that was a bit weird, but then I thought that it probably got them out of the way.

The aesthetics of the environment affects the process. The digital space we stare into for thousands of hours is an aesthetic environment, it exerts some influence.

Or maybe it's about productiveness and any given application will facilitate a workflow that works for you or it won't?

This is totally in accordance with the point im making too. There's no either/or between our points.

Maybe not for you but I could work next to a rotting pile of garbage and it wouldn't affect the outcome of what I was doing. To me all that stuff is New Age bullshit because it doesn't have any impact on me. Last year we released an album that is head and shoulders better than anything we've done before and we did it all in Cubase, which I think is both ugly and incredibly cluttered. But that didn't stop me from doing my best work because the workflow was there.

Some people have very little aesthetic sensitivity. They just dont care about it, or feel it much. They still make music, and why not. But I think that affects their music. Discussions like these will seem like nonsense to them them.

Very likely, because it's all interconnected. Nobody's creativity is restricted to one sense. In my work I rely completely on my visual creativity, my senses of scale and balance and composition and colour and all the rest of it. But I pour all of that into the work, I don't need to feel it in the tools I use to get that work done. I don't get to choose my tools at work but I do at home, yet none of it affects the quality of my work. It may affect my enjoyment of a task and how quickly I can get it done but that's about it, really. It's the same with music - it doesn't matter what tools I use, as long as I can get the job done. I used to think it did but I have learned better over the years, mostly through forced change.

We started off using Orion. I did our first four albums with it. Then we moved to Cubase and put out an album that was measurably better than the others. But that had nothing at all to do with Cubase, it had everything to do with another 4 or 5 years of experience and the fact that we had done the album first in Orion, before moving to Cubase, so it was also our second stab at it, which you'd have to think would be better regardless.

We've started work on our next album in Studio One and I fully expect it to be better again, not because of the move but because were are, again, further along our journey and wiser than we were a few years ago. We'll do a better job because we're better at our job than we were last time.

[jancivil]

"Some people have very little aesthetic sensitivity. They just dont care about it, or feel it much. They still make music, and why not. But I think that affects their music. Discussions like these will seem like nonsense to them [then]."

I have extreme senstivity aesthetically, though. EG: I cannot stand the way REAPER looks by default and could never use it.
I actually spend what some would consider an inordinate amount of time coloring tracks in Cubase and channels in VE Pro.
At some point 'aesthetic objection' would include clutter, but my remarks are in the context of what people who aren't Cubase users harp on so frequently as to ergonomics. The discussion here also has quite a bit of baggage, the OP is constantly on about everything is done wrong and it's gotten old here. So ergonomics is not exactly aesthetics in this certain sense.

I'm def. not that person, I'm actually more like someone that wonders if someone making ugly music really prefers an ugly environment.

the aesthete.jpg

[jancivil]

this is how it goes in Cubase for me these days:
workspaces

⌥ 1,
⌥ 2,
⌥ 3,
⌥ 4.

other than setup, these are the windows for work in Cubase. ⌥ 4 is a Project workspace, the others Global
I should worry? Oh yeah, there's a fair amount of Offline Processing window as well which is fn7 and clicking a close window button.

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"i think the term boring isnt serving the point your triyng to make."/sic
again, KVR Hosts subforum context: the same one who does 'the most uncluttered interface' has done 'are today's DAWs just boring' and other distractions for us. So yeah "transparent" is more precise than BONES' 'boring' (which I had as a reaction to the excitement someone wanted in teh DAW, it *should* be bloody boring. Little AI dudes scuttling about doing jobs as though Scrubbing Bubbles. Dogs chasing scantily clad chicks or some shit. I'm not actually kidding.)

My "It looks like a good excuse for not being busy with the thing the DAW does to me." resides in this context, it's "Cubase is so clunky and cluttered" on crack. Me, I don't have any perception Cubase is demanding to be looked at, if it is, I'm looking at the bit I need to look at. I only recently came up with putting Audio Part in a Workspace behind having so many in a couple projects it WAS clunky and cluttered. Now it's sorted.

[trewq]

Since there are so many possible ways to manage and manipulate both midi and audio, it's gets confusing for me to see these two occupy the same space in a UI, or even the same Ui.

[jancivil]

I occasionally need to have things in the MIDI line up with a bit of audio that isn't made to show hitpoints at all, or to introduce something new rhythmically, so I will click option-4 or whatever to get that up, snap. Manipulating the audio like time-stretching is more of a different hat on; but if it's about time-stretching in both I need to look at the numbers in Offline Processing and get the calculator out (sample locations measured in hundreds of thousands if not millions) because a global time-stretch is too much thought (and too much arithmetic) as well as coarser, and other issues (artifacts).

[trewq]

Yes, sounds impossibly complex to get the midi to line up with audio stretch or mangle if thats what you are talking about


Most of those operations i will do with midi, before importing to make the audio.

[jancivil]

Yeah, I have to be very specific for a short stretch of time to match stretch in an audio clip to what I just did in MIDI. After a point I will just re-render, because here the time stretch is not for a time-stretchy effect, it's just timing. And a more extensive stretch will have artifacts. PITA really. There are cases where I just cut my losses and move on, but if it's rhythmically a certain kind of thing...

But with what I do, renders vary owing to things like round-robin, and even latency so there are bits of audio I don't want to do over so much*. If it's pure audio (foley/sound FX) I'll just re-insert the clip. Here Offline Processing is pretty crucial, ie., reinstantiate this eariler move specifically but not where the problem occurred.
*: <This section was more or less it, later it really isn't.> Another render might have it right in that spot. Not unusual for me to do a final mix with two or three 2-files and careful af editing.
I'd just as soon get it all in one export from the MIDI actually, except for the things I can only do with audio processing specifically.

[MuzikFreq]

I find blank interfaces kind of boring and kinda saps the energy I had.
I more just look blankly at the interface and just go "meh"
I actually love Reason for the rack approach where I can see everything at work and not so hidden away because I know what synth is doing what and can adjust it quickly if need be.
Tools are simple and not overly complicated, and while it can get busy and clunky, can still find stuff easily.

I have some bitwig projects that won't load anymore because missing files .... I don't know why since I haven't moved squat, and I need to search around to find what is doing what at times.
Ableton is the same way sometimes.

Maybe it's just me liking the thumbnail view/full synth re view as I can find stuff quickly.

[melomood]

I look at it like a blank canvas and I can either paint a picture there or not,but either way I can't blame the canvas for what happens next