Most innovative / impactful advancements in digital music production in the last decade?

[lightsfadelow]

In 2012, about a decade ago, Steinberg released Cubase 7 with VariAudio built directly into the mixing workflow. At the time, it seemed like DAWs were releasing innovation after innovation.

Honestly, VariAudio was the last major innovation I can recall dramatically improving my music creation experience. It’s been longer than that since any virtual instrument or effects plugin lit my world on fire. I haven’t seen a new digital toy that looked worthy of purchasing in quite some time.

I’ve recently upgraded from an older Win DAW to an overpowered Mac Studio and Logic to freshen things up, but I’m wondering:

Did I just buy myself more tracks and lower latency or is there a world of innovation out there I’m missing out on… a world that couldn’t have practically existed on 10-year-old computing platforms? If there is a true decade of innovation that my new purchase unlocked, what new DAW feature, virtual instrument, or effect lit your world on fire recently? (Bonus: why couldn't it have existed in 2012?)

[dark water]

this plugin


Also several of the AI-assistant / detection software plugins of the last few years (which you'd still highly likely be able to run on a 10-year old computer without too many project-stopping CPU issues) have been game-enhancers if not game-changers for many of us producers.
Stuff like Soothe2 etc.

[lightsfadelow]

this plugin


Also several of the AI-assistant / detection software plugins of the last few years (which you'd still highly likely be able to run on a 10-year old computer without too many project-stopping CPU issues) have been game-enhancers if not game-changers for many of us producers.
Stuff like Soothe2 etc.

Did you mean to add a link to a plugin where you wrote “this plugin”?

[FapFilter]

i don't think we will be seeing many completely new technologies that will blow anything before out of the water.
hopefully refined workflows that makes things quicker and easier to achieve, or some features one DAW is lacking ATM other DAW(s) might already have.
Biggest gains will be, as already stated, in the AI department, which can and will remove the need for a mixing and/or mastering engineer, or at least can do things that's 99% where the artist wants it to be within seconds, vs hours, days, or weeks when mixed by a human being.
Of course at one point it surely will be able to fully replace the human in the actual process of composing, but i think that's not the direction most musicians would want it to go.
of course both aspects won't be perfect in the beginning, but they will get better and better, until no human input will be needed anymore

[dark water]

this plugin


Also several of the AI-assistant / detection software plugins of the last few years (which you'd still highly likely be able to run on a 10-year old computer without too many project-stopping CPU issues) have been game-enhancers if not game-changers for many of us producers.
Stuff like Soothe2 etc.

Did you mean to add a link to a plugin where you wrote “this plugin”?

Ah, sorry I was trying to be silly with the KVR meme of 'this plugin is amazing...'

However, the more I think about it, I truly think that this plugin (called Architecture by Loomer) is a game changer in terms of what it allows / will allow users to do with midi:

https://loomer.co.uk/architect.html

I bought it about one year ago, and I'm yet to get my head around it properly, but it can allow a huge array of programming options which some tech-savvy musicians will no doubt thrive with.
It's not going to tax your computer's CPU greatly compared to a computer of 10 years ago (and I know because I still use a Lenovo T430 Thinkpad from that era!).
But it does offer something to software music producers that didn't exist in software form around 2012 (I forget the name of the amazing hardware midi tool which was around at that time).

Lastly, I'm not sure if fits in with your thread idea of anything dazzlingly new as such, but certainly there has some excellent progress in the world of software reverbs (such as Liquidsonics Cinematic Pro), MPE-software and microtonal software / hardware since 2012.



One leap forward which hasn't yet been achieved to a high level is the extracting of vocals from a complete song. I'm sure that many of us would love such a tool to exist (to an artifact-low level) but I'm not sure it ever will. Fingers crossed however

[lightsfadelow]

Thank you. I checked out Architect and was surprised to see it’s in Beta given the fact you’ve had it for a year.

I agree harnessing AI will be valuable. Hopefully plugins will leverage the Apple Neural Engine cores that are on every M1 chip!