Tag: DAW

Why You Shouldn’t Write a DAW – David Rowland – ADC23

https://audio.dev/ -- @audiodevcon​

Why you shouldn’t write a DAW - David Rowland - ADC 2023

There are surprisingly few DAWs in the music making world, especially when compared to the number of audio plugins on the market. Why is this? Could it be that all the DAWs in existence are perfect and there’s no need for another one? Perhaps there’s another reason…

In this talk we dive behind the UI/UX to take a deeper look at the technology that underpins DAWs. We’ll take a tour of some of the problems they solve, often transparently to the user, and some of the technical concepts they have to navigate in order to keep music makers in the groove.

Finally, we look at what alternatives there might be if you want to build a product that looks a bit like a DAW and why not building from scratch might save you a lot of time and money.

Link to Slides:
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David Rowland

Dave Rowland is the CTO at Audio Squadron (owning brands such as Tracktion and Prism Sound), working primarily on the digital audio workstation, Waveform and the engine it runs on. Other projects over the years have included audio plugins and iOS audio applications utilising JUCE. In academia, David has taught on several modules at the University of the West of England on programming for audio. David has a passion for modern C++ standards and their use to improve code safety and brevity, has spoken at the Meeting C++ and Cpp On Sea conferences and is a regular speaker at the Audio Developer Conference and related monthly meetup. Past presentations: https://github.com/drowaudio/presentations/
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Streamed & Edited by Digital Medium Ltd: https://online.digital-medium.co.uk
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Organized and produced by JUCE: https://juce.com/
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Special thanks to the ADC23 Team:

Sophie Carus
Derek Heimlich
Andrew Kirk
Bobby Lombardi
Tom Poole
Ralph Richbourg
Jim Roper
Jonathan Roper
Prashant Mishra

#adc #dsp #audio #daw

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The Architecture of Digital Audio Workstations (& Other Time-Based Media Software) – Ilias Bergström

https://audio.dev/ -- @audiodevcon​

The Architecture of Digital Audio Workstations (and Other Time-Based Media Software) - Ilias Bergström - ADC23

The ADC community has produced a wonderful wealth of material on audio software development!

But there is a relative dearth on the big picture of how all these coding techniques, practices, strategies, and design patterns, can interrelate, giving rise to the complex beast that is a modern Digital Audio Workstation (DAW).

While there are some open-source DAWs to study, there is little material on their architecture, apart from the source code itself - with the main exception being the (GUI-less) Tracktion engine of course.

Although implicit / emergent architecture may be sufficient for small to medium size codebases, a large codebase such as a DAW demands deliberate attention to design.

We present the low-level design patterns for the DAW engine and presentation layers, the UI/UX design patterns these interrelate to, and the architectural design patterns for the complete system. Crucially, the main emphasis of our talk is not the details of the above, but how they all together define a modern DAW.

We then present the challenges faced in defining such an architecture to satisfy the specific Attributes of a DAW - e.g. a non-destructively alterable model, and the real-time constraints that necessitate lock-free communication between threads. We discuss the compromises needed to satisfy such conflicting needs, and some future challenges presented, as the software category evolves into the future, e.g. with MIDI 2.0 around the corner.

While we concentrate on DAWs, much of this discussion also generalises to the broader category of Time-Based Media software.

The presentation is grounded in two DAW-like applications we have developed: one is a desktop application with a GUI, and the other is a "headless" embedded DAW, with a separately executed GUI application. They are both very different, each lacking central features that the other has. But together, and even more so through their differences, they serve as great illustrations of the concepts we present.

This subject area is vast, and a review of every topic and technique is impossible in the scope of a single talk. We give a good introductory overview, hopefully laying a foundation for further learning and knowledge dissemination in the community.

Link to Slides: https://data.audio.dev/talks/2023/the-architecture-of-daws/slides.pdf
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Ilias Bergström

Senior Software Engineer, ElkComputer Scientist, Researcher, Interaction Designer, Musician, with a love for all music but specially live performance. I've worked on developing several applications for live music, audiovisual performance, and use by experts, mainly using C++. I get very excited whenever anybody mentions "control data" in my vicinity!
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Streamed & Edited by Digital Medium Ltd: https://online.digital-medium.co.uk
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Organized and produced by JUCE: https://juce.com/
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Special thanks to the ADC23 Team:

Sophie Carus
Derek Heimlich
Andrew Kirk
Bobby Lombardi
Tom Poole
Ralph Richbourg
Jim Roper
Jonathan Roper
Prashant Mishra

#adc #daw #dsp #audio

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Wilsonic: Microtonal Scale Design in the DAW – Marcus Hobbs – ADCx SF

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4C2XdCjVnkA

Join Us For ADC23 - London - 13-15 November 2023
More Info: https://audio.dev/
@audiodevcon

Wilsonic: Microtonal Scale Design in the DAW - Marcus Hobbs - ADCx SF

Wilsonic MTS-ESP is an interactive musical scale design tool which tunes up all of the software synthesizers in your DAW in real-time, and every tuning parameter is automatable. We will explore the most novel of Erv Wilson's scale system designs and show you how to explore and personalize your own scales to create your signature sound and emotional palettes.

Slides: https://data.audio.dev/talks/ADCxSF/2023/wilsonic-microtonal-scale-design-in-the-daw/slides.pdf
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Marcus Hobbs

Microtonal electronica creator and audio plug-in developer. Pioneering microtonality by implementing Erv Wilson's scale designs and tuning systems. Creator of Wilsonic and Synth One. Microtonal education and software evangelist.

Edited by Digital Medium Ltd - online.digital-medium.co.uk
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Organized and produced by JUCE: https://juce.com/
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Special thanks to the ADC Team:

Sophie Carus
Derek Heimlich
Andrew Kirk
Bobby Lombardi
Tom Poole
Ralph Richbourg
Jim Roper
Jonathan Roper

#audiodevcon #audiodev #midi

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