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Comment by ukyrgf | Hacker News Reader

I love seeing software that still has a "Screenshots" section of their website. It's looked the same for as long as I've been using computers to record audio, starting with my high school band's demo over 15 years ago.

I could probably make fun of Audacity for not keeping up with the times, but if you look at other DAWs you'll see none are exactly bastions of good interface design. I got a little more serious about my music last year and decided I wanted to invest in a nice DAW, but after demoing I few I felt completely unimpressed. They're nearly identical to how they were 15 years ago, other than my PC being much more powerful. I ended up just sticking with Reaper, and hoping something comes along someday to mix the industry up. Proprietary dongles and tiered versions of the exact same software with gimped features doesn't cut it for me.

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> but if you look at other DAWs you'll see none are exactly bastions of good interface design

What? Modern "good interface design" (at least by HN standards) has almost nothing to say about complicated 1000+ feature apps. (In fact every time I rant that modern design sucks and that apps need more features the first response I usually get back is, "but that's so much more testing! Do you know how many execution paths we'd have to manage???" Well, that is kind of the point)

Have you ever produced music with any of these tools? For one, their goals are different -- FLStudio, for example, tries to be "the fastest path from your brain to your speakers", and the interface seems as such and is loved for it. Ableton intentionally crams everything into one screen because it is used as a performance tool -- if you've seen any recent photos of Daft Punk et al performing, you'll see it running right there on a laptop, usually above the mixer or the CDJs. Cubase has kept an interface very similar to its original Atari 2600 (I think?) version, because people have been using that app for 30+ years now.

Any time I see new-school UI designers' take on audio apps I cannot help but cringe. They are completely misunderstanding and underestimating their audience -- audio is complicated and we need complex tools to do what we do.

"Cubase has kept an interface very similar to its original Atari 2600 (I think?) version"

Cubase on a 2600 would be something to see. Cubase was introduced for the Atari ST in the late 80s. The UI has changed quite a bit, but the basic UI principles of early MIDI sequencers have carried over into modern DAWs.

Edit: A screenshot: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/OlspnqVcJho/maxresdefault.jpg

See also Deluxe Music in the Amiga 1200:

https://youtu.be/OwROU4UkE84?t=45s

I won a copy of Deluxe Music for Amiga in a music competition when I was a kid; I'd made the winning track in MED or OctaMED, and kept using MED/OctaMED even after winning Deluxe Music.

I found Deluxe Music cartoonish and not capable of doing what I wanted. I dismissed it almost immediately. It felt like wearing gloves to compose after coming from trackers, where you had tick-precision (this was sort of a weird combination of interrupts and the BPM of your song, I don't remember the details now) control over everything like volume, pitch, arpeggiation, the Paula filter, etc.

I think it's worth noting that Deluxe Music is distinctly not what modern DAWs look like, while Cubase kinda sorta is. Deluxe Music brought traditional music notation into the computer, which was great for folks who were comfortable with it, but you lose a lot of control and information visibility when you do that. And, of course, it requires your user to have some sort of formal music education.

There are still tools that'll work with traditional music notation, but very few people use them for composition. There's millions of copies of DAWs using a Cubase-ish sequencer-style interface in use every day.

Oh, man: MED and then OctaMED (when it eventually landed on a magazine cover CD) were my trackers of choice for creating music for the games I was always tinkering with back in the early 90s, and arguably the reason I got back into music production as hobby in the late noughties.

If you find yourself wanting to play with trackers today, Renoise is the modern spiritual successor of MED and ProTracker and the like, and it's really great, and is competitive with modern DAWs in that it supports VSTs and controllers and automation and such. SunVox is also super cool, but for different reasons...it's more of a minimalist tool.

Thanks for the recommendation - there's still something appealing to me about the tracker way of working (and it's only €68!).

Seconding this. Renoise is amazing. And extremely affordable compared to other DAWs.

I originally picked it because its demo version doesn't have any of the more extreme limitations that make it very hard to actually create something. Only WAV export is disabled, which is fairly easy to work around if you must. Buying the license is totally worth it though, because it's cheap and you get the ability to easily records part of a track to another sample/instrument, which is a great workflow. Being somewhat familiar with trackers was also a nice bonus, of course.

Atari ST... I stand corrected :)

It would be quite a feat to put Cubase on an Atari 2600, a machine with 128 bytes of RAM. Not kilobytes - bytes.

Logic Audio (I started at v5) remains the most complex UI I have ever had to learn. It makes perfect sense to me now, but I long thought it was designed by sadists. I just did t understand the why of it.

> Any time I see new-school UI designers' take on audio apps I cannot help but cringe. They are completely misunderstanding and underestimating their audience -- audio is complicated and we need complex tools to do what we do.

Absolutely. Also worth mentioning is that many of these tools borrow elements from physical recording studios. If you haven’t worked in a professionally wired studio, some of the abstractions seem dated and unnecessary. Replacing / reimagining them is not practical, as DAWs still need to run in these environments. But try explaining that to someone who is just starting out chopping loops in their bedroom.

Agreed, particularly about Logic... I learned that program last and so much of the UI seemed to get in my way when all I wanted was to quickly lay out something like track routing. FL has spoiled me :P

> If you haven’t worked in a professionally wired studio, some of the abstractions seem dated and unnecessary.

Do you have some examples of that?

> Logic’s UI makes perfect sense to me now

Can you elaborate on that? That UI still bothers me although I love Logic’s plugins.

How did you learn the UI? Just through trial and error? By reading the manual? Something else?

Just trial and error is enough. And it's not that different from most others DAWs anyway

Have you looked at Ardour [0] too? What's your view of its interface?

[0] https://ardour.org/

Its not a DAW its an audio editor than can do multi-track, so its kind of apples to oranges. Its a great tool for recording it even runs well on the pi3. Ardour is great but its too demanding for the pi, runs great on my t420.

I fully agree with the above. There's a truckload going on in all these interfaces.

The thing people don't like here, which is absolutely true, is that if you want to use FLStudio, or Ableton, or even Cubase, and think you're going to succeed just by opening up the app and clicking around, you're wrong. You actually do need to use the tutorials and read the manual. (It's exactly the same if you buy any kind of complex pro audio hardware as well, from synths to guitar modelling tools like the Kemper Profiler.)

In my experience the documentation for FLStudio and Live is great. Full on, stellar fantastic. And there are a million quick tutorials from all kinds of people on YouTube to help. You just have to be willing to learn and invest the time to get the results you want. These things are not intended to be the audio equivalent of Instagram: for that you should look elsewhere (I'm not sure where actually).

GarageBand?

Assuming that comment isn't simply trolling...

GarageBand is certainly powerful, especially given it's deliberate limitation, and both myself and friends have used it to great effect, but Ableton Live it is not. If you look at Logic - which GarageBand is really a cut down version of - you see a similar degree of complexity to that in other professional level DAWs.

Not everyone needs a professional level DAW, and even those who do wouldn't necessarily use one all the time: as I've said, I still use Audacity, and GarageBand on the iPad or iPhone is a super-handy tool.

The parent was commenting on people who ridiculously bleat on about the the UX of complex professional level audio tools, not suggesting there isn't a place for tools that are simpler.

I should have made myself clearer: I was not proposing GarageBand as an alternative to professional-grade DAWs, but rather as the "Instagram for music" GP refered to in its last sentence.

Fair shout, and my bad for misinterpreting. Thanks for the clarification.

Huh, I could not disagree more. DAWs are some of the most well thought out, reliable software I use. For a relatively niche product it’s amazing to me that there are something like 10 very different but very high quality options to choose from.

And they have changed a lot in 15 years. Not that long ago you pretty much had to use hardware synths and samplers to create electronic music and DAWs were just used for recording or mixing tracks. Today you can create full tracks with just the included synths and samples, then you can play a live show straight from the same session, and there are tons of built in effects to get a great sounding mix. Plus details in the UI, routing tracks, editing audio and midi, beat detection of samples, etc are always improving with each release. I will grant you, a lot of the top companies (pro tools, logic, Cubase, ableton) were around in a similar form 15 years ago and some 25+ years ago, but that’s not totally crazy given how complex the software is.

As for something new coming along to mix it up, I’m curious what type of changes would meet that criteria? I’d say Ableton and more recently Bitwig (and I’m sure the argument could be made for many others that I’m less familiar with) have both done that.

Have you tried bitwig? It's fairly new and seems to do alot of things right.

not op but thanks for the suggestion

It was created by a bunch of ex-Ableton engineers so it is heavily influenced by that.

For what I do (mostly, stereo recordings of a choral group in which I sing), Audacity does everything that I need.

While my digital recorder came with a copy of Cubase LE, I took one look at the EULA and the bullshit DRM, promptly installed Audacity, and never looked back.

Just look at Ableton Live 10 which has just been announced. Granted, it is an evolution, not revolution, but that's what happens when the people who make software care about efficiency and familiarity (instead of novelty and trendiness).

As a music app developer myself, I can say that UI design for music software is a completely different beast than "general" UI design.

This version has new themes. I'm happy to see an end to the weird fuzzy mushy looking buttons. I don't really like the other theme that I could find pictures of (Dark Audacity), but making it themeable is a big win. I might even tackle making a theme myself, as I use Audacity pretty regularly for the final mastering pass of tracks I make in FL Studio or Renoise or REAPER. It's a great tool but the UI has always been sad.

>* I got a little more serious about my music last year and decided I wanted to invest in a nice DAW, but after demoing I few I felt completely unimpressed. They're nearly identical to how they were 15 years ago, other than my PC being much more powerful.*

That's not even remotely true. Except if you mean "they superficially look similar to what they did 15 years ago".

That's because their fundamental functions are of course still the same as 15 or 20 years ago: sequencing MIDI and audio. Same with NLE, what did you expect, some thought-to-song interface?

I'm more likely to download your app if you have some informative screenshots on your webpage.

Check out Helio Workstation (open source). It has quite an interesting UI:

https://helioworkstation.com/

To my surprise, the shareware contender GoldWave (which I used a lot in my youth, preferred it to Audacity) hasn't changed practically one bit either.

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