Hacker News Reader

Comment by adamnemecek | Hacker News Reader

I'm actually working full time on a new DAW that should make writing music a lot faster and easier. Current DAWs don't really understand music. Also the note input process and experimentation is extremely time consuming and the DAW never helps. Current DAW : my thing = Windows Notepad : IDE. The HN audience is definitely one of my core groups.

If you are interested, sign up here https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1-aQzVbkbGwv2BMQsvuoneOUPgyr... and I'll contact you when it's released.

View on HN

I've also made a few iOS apps for the purpose of simplifying composition, though they're pretty limited in scope (on purpose). Although it seems most composers would prefer to use full DAWs from the start, I'm personally much more creative when I'm able to jot down and edit my fragmented musical ideas as quickly as possible, if only to make the initial draft. (If I were a better singer or musician, I'd just use a recorder or a looper — but my skills aren't quite there yet, and besides, it's hard to note-edit a recording.) Composer's Sketchpad[1] lets you paint notes directly onto a time/pitch canvas, bending and stretching them as they go along. (This works great for e.g. guitar solos.) MusicMessages![2] is a more basic piano roll that lets users quickly tap buttons across several layers to enter notes. (Musical bubble wrap! Works great for riffing on short drum sequences and chord progressions.)

There's another similar-sounding project called Helio that was posted a few weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14212054

I hope that in time, we get more Markdown-style composition tools vs. the full DAW suite. Good luck! I'm looking forward to seeing what you make.

P.S. AudioKit is pretty dope. :)

[1]: http://composerssketchpad.com

[2]: http://musicmessages.io -- working on turning it into a full iOS app, so will probably have to shut it down and fold it into the new app at some point

Sounds really cool! Actually, I'm close to releasing a (looper) DAW -- kinda geared towards live use, but I've thought a lot about composition too.

https://zenaud.io

Send me an email at mpercossi at zenaud.io , always fun to talk to fellow audio devs :)

And for all the vim lovers out there -- my app supports vi commands for movement and editing :)

That looks really nice... too bad there's no Linux support :/

Yes, it is a shame. But: I will add it, along with Windows support.

Indeed, I'll go further. I'm really starting to believe that the only way not to get royally screwed as an app developer is by abandoning the "major" platforms -- which all want to turn you into a serf -- and target OSS platforms like Linux. I'm honestly tiring of dealing with the artificial roadblocks Apple (and Microsoft is no better) throw at me to further their own ends. I actually analysed SteamOS with this intent, but sadly it looks like SteamOS is geared towards the "living room" experience.

Anyway, long story short: there will be Linux support in 2018.

Does it have per note editing? For example in trackers you can specifically set a note to play volume X, pan Y, pitch Z

zenAud.io is designed for live use, so it currently doesn't have a piano roll -- instead, you define record loops using editing tools in the arrangement view and record MIDI or audio into it. You can also drag and drop to import standard MIDI files into the arrangement if you want to use pre-written stuff.

I realize this is a big limitation, but we intend to add a piano roll in the next few months.

Well you're surely over-promising, here's hoping you won't under-deliver. Do you have anything at all to show yet?

What do you think is an over promise? The resulting app will be less than 10KLOC, discounting third party libs.

I don't have a demo yet if that's what you are asking about but I've open sourced this for example

https://github.com/adamnemecek/WebMIDIKit

Actually I do have some old demos but they don't show the best parts. It's actually kind of hard to show those right now.

>a new DAW that should make writing music a lot faster and easier.

>Current DAWs don't really understand music.

>Current DAW : my thing = Windows Notepad : IDE.

It really sounds like you're promising a lot.

Have you seen e.g. synfire?

I'd be really interested to hear the concept of how you are making things more IDE-esque

I think my idea of a perfect music program is closer to vim than an IDE, but you're on the right track.

There's a lot of vim too :-).

Great. To be specific, what I dream of is something that can operate on higher-level musical constructs analogous to vim's text objects (works, lines, parentheses, etc). Chords, scales, rhythms, melodies? I don't really know exactly what this would look like but I suspect it could be very slick if someone got it right. I had some ideas and thought about implementing them a while ago but it got deprioritised next to making my own music and had to get to the back of the "some day I'll..." queue.

I've signed up to your google form, so I'll look forward to seeing what, if anything, you come up with :) I am on linux (and yes, I agree that music on linux is a pain), so I might not get to use it unless you port it, but I still look forward to seeing it, whatever it is.

Yes, you get it! That's exactly what this is. You sound exactly like me lol. I love higher order things and I've been chasing this "mirage" since I was like 12 but I never had the chops and time to really devote to this. Do you think that we could chat sometime? My email is my username at gmail.

Have a look at extempore, a lispy live music/notation language and environment. Only emacs bindings, no vim, but impressive preformance nevertheless...

[0]: http://extempore.moso.com.au/

[1]: https://github.com/digego/extempore

I played around with this a while back and there are Vim plugins for it. My biggest problem was having to compile the thing from source which involved also compiling a custom version of LLVM, which took forever. It's possible this is no longer a problem.

I'm aware of extempore; it's impressive. I actually use SuperCollider quite a lot (in vim), which is not lispy (more OO) but in a similar space. But what I want is something that can operate on music how vim operates on text, not just operating on music-written-as-text in vim!

Have you looked at Lilypond? http://lilypond.org/

I have. "LilyPond is a music engraving program, devoted to producing the highest-quality sheet music possible. "

I don't need or want any of that. In fact when I write music, music engraving is the least of my concerns. Actually music engraving is generally the least of my concerns period.

Also I find the current music notation to be kinda idk outdated. I can read it, but I feel like it's a system designed by someone who had the mathematical knowledge of a 15th century farmer (which is probably how it came to be).

>Also I find the current music notation to be kinda idk outdated. I can read it, but I feel like it's a system designed by someone who had the mathematical knowledge of a 15th century farmer (which is probably how it came to be).

What specifically about it?

I can read (and prefer) standard musical notation but when handwriting I use Hummingbird [0] because I find it aides itself to handwriting. But I can't really imagine a "better" musical notation than what is the standard today, except a better way to communicate natural/flat/sharp notes.

[0] http://www.hummingbirdnotation.com/

This is a long discussion. But fundamentally music notation is very paper oriented and doesn't exploit the advantages screens offer.

> (and prefer) standard musical notation

Prefer it over what?

I wanted to bring up Hummingbird notation with a specific context in which I prefer it (handwriting) while still being clear that I prefer standard notation over Hummmingbird as a whole.

Use vim to compose an abc file, then play it with software listed at http://abcnotation.com or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABC_notation

IMO, classical notation is the Vim of music - it looks bizarre to outsiders, it's totally unintuitive, it requires a lot of memorisation and practice to use effectively, but it's extraordinarily efficient in the hands of an expert user.

How is it efficient? What exactly is the alternative?

It's very quick to read and write. It contains all of the vital musical information in a very concise format. Numerous alternative schemes for musical notation have been tried, but none have achieved significant adoption.

What don't current DAWS understand about music?

Same thing that pencils don't understand about writing, and paintbrushes don't understand about art.

Better question is what do they do understand about music?

Well can you tell us about that? You're the one who made the claim.

Check out synfire, it's the only sw that somewhat similar. but it's very expensive, and the ui isn't great (sometimes it looks like writing music in excel, like it can provide "intelligence" but you have to check check boxes and click on things, aintnobodygottimeforthat.maymay. Some people might find it interesting that it's written in Smalltalk tho.

I'd argue that current DAWs expect the user to understand at least something about music. Sounds like OP is working on some "syntax-aware" features for their DAW.

Also, if this DAW understands something about music, will it constrain me to its understanding about music?

Most of what I write is highly dissonant or straight up microtonal.

> will it constrain me to its understanding about music

This is actually exactly what I'm trying to prevent. Most of the current solutions only kind of constrain you to a certain tonal space that you can maybe explore but the space of possible compositions is actually insanely large. My DAW is going to try to help you explore all that.

Microtonality is definitely something I've thought about and I think I can make it work but I'm curious to know what do you use currently to compose?

I lean towards Reaper the most as far as DAWs go.

Often I'll use http://www.huygens-fokker.org/scala/ and my synths and a fair bit of SuperCollider/Overtone.

Isn't knowing something about music something of a prerequisite for someone who wants to make music? Of course everyone has to start somewhere, but as musician of 20 years who loves DAWs, I would say learn an instrument first, or at least concurrently, if you want to start producing music.

The thing is that once you learn the music theory, few DAWs let you leverage that to be more productive.

Also why do you have to learn music theory first, why can't the DAW teach you as you go?

Mostly they don't understand well all the possibilities outside of typical meter and tuning systems. They can do some but tend to push you to writing 4-beat meters in 12-note-equal-temperament. Rhythm and pitch both have far far far more possibilities which DAWs either ignore or at least make second-class options you have to kind of fight for or try a few limited tastes.

Can you explain what a DAW is?

Quick google: Digital Audio Workstation (DAW)

Many comments here mostly mention software. But there are some interesting exceptions. Check Surgeon for example, who likes to use his custom controllers with Ableton. You actually can see him re-wire the controllers every now and then. (Great music too ;))

https://youtu.be/KM558N6PJmY

Digital Audio Workstation. Think Ableton Live, Apple Logic Pro, Avid's Pro Tools, FL Studio, Cakewalk Sonar, Propellerheads Reason... tools to record/arrange/produce/master music.

They are all different beast that once you learn one you don't want to relearn another.

The only difference is that Abelton Live and Bitwig (Runs on Linux) are designed for live performance.

I like Reaper (Cost is 1/5 but equally capable) and it also runs reasonably well under Linux. https://linuxmusicians.com/viewtopic.php?t=15280

Actually many people never pay for a license it has a similar model as Sublime Text.

>The only difference is that Abelton Live and Bitwig (Runs on Linux) are designed for live performance.

Ableton, at least, also functions perfectly fine in the traditional piano-roll and timeline paradigm of DAW workflow too. Don't let the 'Live' part of the name mislead you into thinking it's only for live performers; it does everything the 'old DAWs' do, AND it's got great features to assist in live performance.

Also in terms of underlying concepts, if you know one DAW well, you can usually learn another one fairly quickly, as it becomes more a question of learning the interface more than anything else.

Ableton is probably the best DAW right now simply because it has the most tutorials online.

I remember way back when I used Cubase. Couldn't find any decent help online.

With Ableton, you are spoiled for choice when it comes to tutorials and lessons.

> if you know one DAW well, you can usually learn another one fairly quickly

I couldn't disagree more, but I am talking about doing professional work. The concepts are all the same but getting where you are proficient in a DAW takes a very long time to find the quirks and strangeness that each one comes with to produce a quality piece.

Video Editors are hundred times harder to switch.

A DAW, or Digital Audio Workstation, is to building music what Final Cut Pro is to building video, or what Eclipse is to developing software. Most DAWs consist of multiple tracks which hold multiple audio clips, each of which are scheduled to play at a certain time. You build a song out of these clips, which you have loaded into the DAW. You can also add various effects to the clips and manipulate them. You can store abstract music event data ("play note A here at this time, then play note B Flat at this time") in additional tracks. This data has no sound associated with it, but like a piano player roll, you can set it up to play notes in some instrument, either an internal software instrument provided by the DAW or a third party, or emitted via MIDI to a remote hardware music synthesizer.

DAWs are used to produce the huge majority of music you hear in the media, from commercials to hip hop songs. Even seemingly real orchestral pieces for movies are often composed entirely using artificial instruments. For example, here is Junkie XL showing how he composed themes for Mad Max Fury Road.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VkNeXS0Lmxc

Will this be for electronic music?

Ofc! Im working on this cause I wanted to make some electronic music but none of the current daws really let me express myself the way I want.

Cool, I added myself to your list. What would you say makes your interface different than others?

It's gonna be clean and fast, no clutter. Recently there was this on HN https://github.com/peterrudenko/helio-workstation which kind of scared me cause my UI is somewhat similar (but after thinking about it more, I actually find mine a lot better). Also note that the UI is only like 20% of the whole thing, the thing that I'm really trying to improve is the workflows. I will make Hypersphere the fastest DAW in the world when it comes to expressing your ideas

When I'm in the zone, I don't care about check boxes. I have some new user interface paradigms that I haven't seen done before (I can imagine they have been tried before tho) that should make writing music super painless and should let you express yourself.

Good answer, thanks! I look forward to seeing more and hopefully watching it blossom as it grows. Cheers!

When you say HN audience would be one of your target groups, do you mean that your DAW would be more like a development environment/programming language (like Sonic Pi), or would it have a more traditional interface?

Both actually :-). And those aren't even all of the "composition paradigms" and they are all first class citizens in the UI.

Awesome, I'm stocked to get my hands on this!

Sounds intriging. Any chance it would work under linux?

I kinda wish it would but audio on Linux is such a pain. I think that porting it won't be too bad once it's done but I'm not promising anything.

Can you share some more details? I'm interested, but hesitant about putting my email into some random Google form.

It's gonna be the fastest piano roll. It will have semi live performance kinda like Ableton live but live is sample based, mine is music based. I don't want to reveal too much, but I've talked to professional composers and kind of described the work flow I envision and they all were like "i need to this asap".

Idk if this will appease some of your concerns but I've been around hn for a while (I'm in the top 30 karma wise), I won't spam you.

Have you toyed with live music programming ? just curious

Also nice endeavour

So I'm working on this mostly to scratch my personal itch. I'm aware of those but to be honest I never found them to be more than toys. When I listen to music made in these, I feel like they generally lack some structure. My thing is all about helping you structure things.

Aight. I wasn't comparing btw, just wanted to have your point of view.

Just FYI there will be a small JS programming environment in my thing.

Any further details may be?

Are you interested in anything particular? I can provide a lot more detail but I think that none of that will do it any justice. Sign up and check it out when it's out.

Will this have any support for external VSTs like Massive?

ofc, This is kinda standard. Generally I'll try to go well above and beyond what possible today.

Note that I'm on the core team of AudioKit https://github.com/audiokit/AudioKit which is a platform for AudioUnit development so I know all about how dope plugins are :-).

Hi, I make audio plugins. Let me know if you need OEM plugins for your DAW.

Hm this would have come in really handy a while back lol. I might take you up on the offer still.

No offense, but it sounds like an empty sales pitch. You're trying to bring attention to the product you're building - and there's nothing wrong about it - but you're only presenting only vague promises, without even discussing what do DAWs get wrong about music in any significant detail.

In the spirit of constructive criticism, may be you could at least point to specific negative sides of existing DAWs that you're willing to eradicate?

>Also the note input process and experimentation is extremely time consuming and the DAW never helps

What is so arduous about plugging a midi keyboard in?

I can think a lot more complicated music than I can play. I don't always have access to a keyboard. Piano is a good instrument but sometimes I want to write drums. Also sometimes I want to express relationships between the single notes, not just have the notes themselves. To record 10000 notes from a piano, you need to hit 10000 keys possibly more than once to record them. My thing will let you achieve the same thing with less than 10000 actions.

I agree with you with respect to representation. Pattern/sequence generation is something most DAWs don't have outside of something like Cthulhu which the languages can do easily.

Another thing I've been dying for is an easier way of layering sounds, for example drum hits. Multiple midi sends feels hacky in Ableton and certainly not a first class feature. On the other side of things, the pain of rearranging multiple wavs after wanting to change a note is even more painful.

I totally agree with you about the actions though. Configuring plugins etc can be a huge drain and its very mouse heavy.

I'm not sure if I understood what you meant with layering drum hits. If you mean being able with a single trigger to have layered samples go off that form a drum hit like a snare or bass, then some drum samplers come to mind like Geist. That's the one I personally chose due to wealth of flexible features, but layering a group of samples into a single "hit" is a foundational feature in the program.

> Another thing I've been dying for is an easier way of layering sounds, for example drum hits. Multiple midi sends feels hacky in Ableton and certainly not a first class feature.

Layering drum sounds is a typical feature in all DAWs, and in ableton, with it's instrument and drum racks, it's even easier to layer whatever you want. May be I don't understand what exactly are you trying to achieve?

I see - so almost like you could have a macro that knows certain changes / scales and just hit :dorian or whatever? That's interesting...

Exactly. Be assured tho that you are just barely scratching the surface :-). Sign up above if you haven't, it will be dope.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com