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Comment by udbhavs | Hacker News Reader

There was a comment on the recent Blender 3.0 thread posted here wondering why there isn't an equivalent program for audio. This looks very polished and much more approachable compared to Ardour or LMMS, and seems like a good candidate. But one feature I really wish my dream "Blender for audio" had would be the convenient device view that Ableton and Bitwig offer for working quickly with effects. It's so much faster than the type of effect chains offered by DAWs like FL and makes it fun to mess around and experiment with effects-based synthesis. Looking at the screenshots and videos it looks like Zrythm doesn't have this feature, although I understand how tedious it would be to implement because you would essentially have to write your own effects or create wrappers around others to expose an interface that can fit in a device view. Probably not high on the list of priorities for a work in progress DAW

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I would argue there are many more, and much more widely differing, workflows for DAW use than there are for 3D (maybe even 2D) graphics. There are somewhere in the range of 12-20 "significant" DAWs out there, with a very wide range of workflows supported (not all of them by all the DAWs).

This doesn't include "generation environments" like VCV Rack, Reaktor, Bespoke and many others that don't have any traditional DAW features but are immensely powerful tools for synthesis and compositional discovery and creation.

Depending on the uniqueness of your imagined or actual workflow, there is probably a tool that comes close, but the potential variations do imply that its not hard to come up with a description for "what I really want in an audio tool" that just doesn't exist (at least not without you doing significant work yourself e.g. programming in PureData).

Note that the same is true for 3d/2d, there are a good 20 significant applications all primed for doing "that thing that you wish other tools did" better than any other tool.

If your application does 80% of all work 50% better than the rest, and the last 20% at least just as bad as everyone else, then even if there will be folks who want something that is more specifically tailored to that one thing they really want to do you still have an amazing product. That's certainly Blender, and if someone wants to try to achieve the same in DAW land, most folks who use DAWs will be watching that development with excitement.

They may not switch primary DAW, but using different tools sparks different creative flows, and in a few rare cases, you stick with the new tool.

As the author of another FLOSS DAW, I'd disagree with your closing sentence. The number of users of computer graphics tools outnumbers the computer audio tools by at least 10:1 based on any metric I can find. Maybe I've grown immune to the "excitement" or maybe my 21-year old project is just shite, but I really don't think it works the same way.

Your 21 year old project is amazing and I'm grateful for your efforts.

The slow development of DAWs and ther interfaces is really interesting and I'd love to know your thoughts on explorable UI/UX. You have a very hard job.

Just chiming in saying thanks for Ardour! I'm far from skilled, but it's one of the few programs I always have installed on at least one machine.

If after 20 years you're no longer excited about a new DAW, I'm sorry to hear that, but there are plenty of folks who still get excited when something new comes out that tries to address a gaping hole in the digital audio space. You can be set in which DAW you use because you've been using it for over a decade (even if you own all the other ones because things go on sale so much, and hardware comes with "cheap to upgrade to the full version from" licenses for everything that it's nearly impossible not to just own all the DAWs after a few years. Except maybe Pro Tools), and still go "this looks... really cool, actually. Let's see if it has magic".

(Although of course, if you _make_ a DAW your story is vastly different from the end user experience. You are not hoping to find that magic, you'll have already determined what the magic is, and considered most ways to try to implement it, and maybe even fell out of love with it because of that)

I didn't mean to imply that I'm no longer excited by a new DAW. We're in the middle of adding clip launching to Ardour right now, and that alone is fairly exciting. What I meant was that I don't really detect much excitement in the world from the emergence of a new DAW, and what I do see mostly comes from people who don't seem to actually know very much about existing DAWs. There are way more people talking about Blender 3.0 than anytime a new version of any major DAW is released.

If you asked me, Blender is just insanely good at marketing itself. When it comes to software, having good marketing and sales is always more important than the quality of the product. The Blender team knows this and is very aggressive when it comes to keeping their product in the news. This worked in their favor even in the early days when there still were a few other open source 3D tools that had a chance of growing up to become seriously useful. These projects were starved out by drawing attention away from them. Twenty years later, that space is dominated by Blender so forcefully that there is zero room for an alternative, even as an underdog.

I would frame it more as community building. Which is probably much easier if your potential community is 10x as large.

That isn't quite correct. The Blender team did and does more than just the usual community building. They are more actively seeking attention from media than other open source which I am aware of.

>This doesn't include "generation environments" like VCV Rack, Reaktor, Bespoke and many others that don't have any traditional DAW features but are immensely powerful tools for synthesis and compositional discovery and creation.

that's on the radar as well https://todo.sr.ht/~alextee/zrythm-feature/115

although you can already do this if you use the carla plugin. that feature is about having a more native way to create your own "patches" by connecting various modules/plugins in a container plugin

are you the ardor guy?

yes. alextee is the zrythm guy.

I'm keeping an eye on Bespoke Synth for that.

Am a keen user of Renoise which is not free but it's really good (if you enjoy trackers) and also very affordable.

In the meantime, hyped for how the foss audio world is shaping up. We soon might not even a commercial daw at all anymore, just like Blender is doing in the 3D world (I work with artists in a studio and we switched almost our whole pipeline, sans simulations, to Blender).

that's on the radar but after v1. what you are describing is probably similar to how the modulators look in the modulators tab (see https://manual.zrythm.org/en/modulators/intro.html)

Yeah, and the modulators themselves are a very cool feature too. Excited to see how Zrythm evolves, the UI looks great and it could be a good starting point for beginners.

The value proposition is different. Blender is (afaik) free for your render farm.

In general modeling is a huge team.

Audio/composing is largely a solo activity. What good is “an alternative” if you can get Logic Pro for a few hundred

A working recording studio will not change versions, let alone DAWs, given the non significant investment in plugins, time patching routing, probably to a physical patchbay, and hardware controllers or digital mixers that may have firmware compatibility concerns etc. Apples pace in pushing you off their hardware is many times faster than the geological timespan of pro studio upgrades. Note that Harrison mixing consoles funded some of Ardour dev a few years back expressly to use it for their system, adding bespoke plugins etc.

it’s really a different world from electronic music production, which I’m rather familiar with lol.

Basically, if it involves in-the-box synthesis and largely programmatic sequencing it’s a different animal than a multi track audio editor optimized for comping takes. Ableton workflow makes it clear how they are streamlining features to fit the electrónica (everything is electrónica these days, in terms of the production techniques having been appropriated by everyone else.) And trackers and such are one of the original opinionated platforms expressly for making machine music, as Frooty and it’s ilk like Orion added audio tracks and recording features much later. Workflow. Horses for courses. Upgrade timescales. Different animals. Can’t be everything to everyone.

I don't get how people can compare anything to Blender, which gets many grants and funds from big corporations and would still be shit without it.

Well for audio I think most of the tools are already out there, it's just a matter of bundling them neatly into a nice open source package that has a good UX and workflow.

Could such a feature be implemented as a Zrythm plugin?

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