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Comment by SeanLuke | Hacker News Reader

> In part for these reasons, DAWs are widely loved by their users and serve as a shining example of software making very little assumptions about the user’s creative workflows. Instead, DAWs accommodate numerous paths to reach a desired outcome, in addition to providing the resources and community to teach the user how to create any missing feature themself.

This is amazingly wrong. DAWs are notorious for imposing a specific workflow, and users will select a DAW specifically for some new workflow it has produced. For example, Ableton rose to prominence largely due to its unusual alternative workflow option (the grid) which made it popular on the DJ scene. Other DAWs have workflows and tools which make them popular with composers (Cubase for example) or tinkerers (Bitwig, Reason, etc.).

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That is correct in my own experience. I started composing music using DAWs and little did I know that was only one limited way, creatively speaking, of getting things done. Yes, using DAWs, one can tweak, modify, prefect mistakes, etc. But all that comes at a cost, the cost being the creative part is largely compromised, and I find that the abundance of options make DAW first time users think they've hit the jackpot when in fact, creatively speaking, less is more and their creative growth would be facilitated by simpler tools. When artists lack a certain skill technology can easily fill that void. Initially it seems like the best deal but the cost is large and the sooner they find that out the better they can get to doing real meaningful work. Technology in art in large proportion becomes an artifice that is very attractive but by itself isn't very meaningful.

Yep. In the terms I use, it's another instance of "the medium is the message", and if the medium is an edifice of mechanisms to configure the medium - well, you have trouble communicating a message. So in an actual workflow, most of the DAW will go unused at any moment, for the same kinds of reasons that most of Excel is unused most of the time. The process will traverse and pingpong various paths that loop outside of the software. The tools don't make the rules, but they suggest a path of least resistance.

It's an old problem within software itself and not really addressed until the individual puts their foot down and says, "This. This is the medium, these are the restrictions, this is the way I structure everything." At that point it's possible to define perfect software, but we're too fickle to really get there.

Having used Fruity Loops, Reason, Cubase and Ableton back in the day as a kid, I agree.

Reason + Cubase linked together was a lot of fun :)

>DAWs are notorious for imposing a specific workflow, and users will select a DAW specifically for some new workflow it has produced

That's spectacularly wrong. The core workflows (sequencing, editing audio, mixing, etc) are similar in every DAW because that's their inherent nature, nor because they're somehow imposed upon users.

The only major different paradigm was Live, which, as it name implies, offered a "live clip launching" way of interaction. But that's not about "imposing a strict workflow" it's about supporting a different use case or not. In other words, it's like there were editors for programming, and someone went and make an editor optimized for live coding. And even that, is offered in several DAWs, including BitWig, FL Studio, and even Logic.

The core workflow itself (which involves sequencing, editing audio, mixing, etc) has 100s of ways it can be mixed/matched/customize/performed differently within the same DAW.

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