OpenDAW – a new holistic exploration of music creation inside the browser

I think you make an interesting point about the implications of the no-VST constraint. In the earlier days of Reason (before they had VST support or even Rack Extensions) it was great because I could work on a song on any system that had just Reason installed and anyone that also had the current version could open it as is. No installing plugins and no plugin compatibility issues between users. Away from the studio for a weekend? Just install on a laptop and use the dongle, no problem!

Creatively it was very freeing. Naturally, plugin envy eventually crept in and I was glad when they did add VST support, but I miss the ease of use and portability. And you got to know the stock effects inside and out which offered some streamlining in workflow.

I recently used Bandlab when I was at my girlfriend's and the only thing I had with me was my company's laptop, which I don't install any audio software on.

I wrote and recorded a little song and published it withing three hours or so, just as an experiment.

I had to reload the UI a few times after moving too quickly and because of a janky internet connection, but other than that I thought it was a well designed tool. I think it's liberating to be shielded from the many choices you make when working in a "real" DAW, and when I don't have REAPER or Studio One around, I'll happily work with a tool like this to simply stay in the habit of producing music when on the road.

JUCE 8 does add support for WebView based UIs!

Don't control panels and surfaces send MIDI messages that could be processed in a somehow standard way? Or do they (predominantly) run proprietary protocols over raw USB data pipes?

Yes. Reaper does too. The thing that makes plugins incompatible on Linux is just that they aren't compiled for Linux. You can run some plugins through WINE via some tools, but it's more bug-prone than natively compiled Linux LV2 or VST

Yes, but that in and of itself does nothing to make specific 3rd party plugins available in native format for, say, Linux.

Isn't that's asking for terrible UI latency?

there is a DAW with that feature, they then extracted the multiplayer core and license that. Forget the name, though.

Absolutely agree with you here.

There's a huge divide between people who might play with this at home as a toy and those who would be able to work with professional musicians with it.

The latter group will have some very strict requirements around performance, latency and workflow.

Edit: and reliability

If you're just picking up samples from Splice or whatever and arranging them, sure, latency means nothing, but it becomes pretty crucial when you're recording an instrument.

Not if multitrack recording. If you record it with different latencies you're toast.

> Just add one VST plugin to an audio track and you will instantly add latency.

most plug-ins don't add latency ?

Second this. You can even go down to exactly 0ms of latency, if you are using an analog mixer with multiple simultaneous output routes in front of your digital interface. One output route is for live monitoring the other is for live recording. The DAW just needs to latency compensate the "record head", which almost every professional DAW is doing of course. _Every_ studio is working like that. OK, a lot of studios have digital mixers nowadays, that adds maybe 2-4ms of latency, which is still ok.

There are three places to accumulate latency, the input from the instrument to the computer, the processing of filters, the output to the monitor (headphones/speakers)/recording. Sometimes you can get away with 2 or 3 ms of latency, but anything over 5 ms is super frustrating. Remember, you're fighting the latency between plucking a string or hitting a key and when the computer acknowledging the data and sending it back out to the monitor which you're using as your guide. Best case you go and "massage" the new track to line up with the existing tracks, worst case it sounds like an out of sync high school marching band.

EDIT: The concerns here are primarily with input latency. Between plucking a string and heading it in your monitor it has to go through: your input hardware, the USB interface, the OS, the browser (which doesn't have explicit low latency capabilities), and JS. Most platforms support ASIO which is a low-level driver for reading audio data from devices. About as close to reading the ADCs yourself. Without a low-latency driver working with the OS there's so much latency overhead it's audible.

Because when you want to record your instrument along with whatever else is in your project, timing is critical and everything needs to line up.

You cannot be performing to audio that you are hearing with any delay, especially if the monitoring of the live audio is also being routed through software.

At a certain point of latency it introduced delays and badly affects how you perform. In some circumstances it makes performance actually impossible.

There are ways around this, namely if the software knows exactly what the input and output latency is then the playback and recording can be compensated. For live monitoring though you really need that done in the audio hardware itself in hard real time.

Music is very latency sensitive. If you are recording any source you generally want to have overall latency < 5ms. Input and monitoring latency is usually either handled by using fancy DSP systems or a "hack" where input audio bypasses any internal processing and gets routed directly back for monitoring.

I think the other people got a little too technical.

The reasons are things like, if you want to play in time with a previously recorded track, or if you are using digital effects and need to be able to hear their effect on your instrument as you play it.

Both of these are less of an issue today than they were 15 years ago where a USB 2.0 audio interface added significant delay into audio and made it harder to get what you wanted out of the system.

It is important if you are driving hardware synths and samplers through midi.

Otherwise latency is not really a problem.

I suspect the GP doesn't think much of Ardour's design :)

Polarity might be the most well known Bitwig user. Check out his identically named youtube channel where he often shows interesting Bitwig techiques.

I second Bitwig. It even works a little bit better on Linux in some ways than on Windows!

Definition of success. When people point to your competitor and the competitor is still you.

Heh, the more you know! OpenDAW didn't make that obvious.

I'm reassured that my comparison to Electron was not far off. My point was, if a PWA is usable when all the above is implemented, what you end up with is very similar to a self-updating Electron app, just one that may or may not rely much more heavily on the network at runtime and might work offline (or not).

I admit I didn't realize creating a shortcut to a PWA was already supported as it's not pushed very hard. In Chromium it's buried under dots, "Cast, Save and Share" (which is a bizarre mashup of disparate functions), and finally "Install page as app".

The window that loads still has browser chrome, in the form of a back, refresh, and three dots button. As soon as you navigate somewhere, even within the same app, the url bar appears again, but you can't edit it. It seems that to be able to always hide this bar, you'd need a way to differentiate between "internal" links that should navigate within the page, and external links that should open in a browser.

I tried turning off my internet, and neither figma nor openDAW showed anything more than a blank page, which confirms my feeling of uncertainty around PWAs, namely, how do you know what will actually work offline. It feels fragile, like if I reset my browser or my clear my cache, my installed applications will disappear. I'm not sure I'm comfortable with the blurring of the lines between bookmarks and installed applications.

All this is of course addressable with a lot more infrastructure and work from browser and OS makers. To me it seems like a lot of development to end up with something that behaves a lot like Electron, with the added easteregg of being able to access applications in a browser, without intending that anybody actually do so.