Zrythm: A highly automated and intuitive digital audio workstation

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.

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

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.

A greenfield software project in an inherently complex domain may be intuitive, simple, and fast at first, but claiming it will stay that way is like advertising a rock you throw into the air as "Flying".

I'd also argue that nobody is born with an intuition to work a DAW or any other piece of software, and in that sense I think it's just a misleading term.

I think there are much better words to use to talk about whether a UI is successful or not: "Familiar" is a good word, because then you can ask "familiar to whom" and have a good conversation about what kind of users you have, their backgrounds, how much work you expect them to put into learning your software, etc. "Internally consistent" is another thing you can talk about and to some extent quantify. Being "discoverable" is another thing where you can talk about the balances between having everything right in front of you and a complete information overload. And of course, you can't really get around whether or not a UI is attractive, displaying good colour sense and being visually balanced and such. While you can certainly make pretty things that are impossible to understand, I would tend to argue that there is a bare minimum of prettiness needed to make something that's friendly and engaging.

(PS: Thank you very much for Ardour, it is a remarkable piece of software.)

I will say that I consider Ardour unintuitive, and reading your post on the forums I think we have different takes on the perspective used for this criteria. You seem to be making the argument for users coming from other DAWs to Ardour, whereas Ardour was for me was the first DAW I used. Thus rather than comparing it to existing tools I always try to find out how to do X, and often I have to Google for help because what I expect to be possible is not straightforward/"intuitive".

Let me give out two examples that tripped me up recently

1) Wasn't able to easily reorder my tracks. I would have found intuitive to be able to drag & drop tracks within the main view. Instead I had to switch to the mixer view to reorder them.

2) I was playing around with a song that had around 20 stem tracks. Grouped them out by voice, melody, percussion. But once grouped I couldn't find an easy way to solo an individual track within a group, as the solo button would solo the entire group. For me a group specific set of controls would be intuitive, whereas existing buttons changing their behaviour is not. If I recall correctly I had to click the group name in the main view for it to become uncolored (disabled?) for individual controls to effect individual tracks.

You might think that's the same thing as familiarity with existing software, but it really isn't.

For example: Cubase. You can do a lot with it, but it's a mess of accreted features with some bizarre near-duplications, all splattered around almost randomly. A good few are entirely hidden. You won't find them unless you read the manual and/or watch a video - if you can find it.

A lot of people use it, but it's not a model you'd want to copy.

Ableton Live is more of a mix. Some features are very intuitive, some are less so. But someone has at least thought about typical task-based workflows and tried to minimise the number of UI entities and clicks required to perform them.

None of this is mysterious. The principles of good UI design are well known: minimise clicks, minimise pages, minimise the number of entities that users need to remember, avoid multiple access points for features, avoid hidden modes and secret key combinations (unless it's a command-line app, sort of), group related features, concentrate on implementing the most common tasks with as little friction as possible, avoid constant mode switching, avoid long lists of unrelated items, try to handle windows and dialogs intelligently to avoid clutter, make all operations as consistent as possible, follow general OS and industry standards. (Etc.)

Of course software is specialised and if you don't know anything about DAWs - or photo editing, or 3D - you're going to have to climb a learning curve.

But domain basics are standard. If you know them a good intuitive tool should be able to make them available with as little friction as possible. And a really good tool will anticipate what you're trying to do and make it even easier than you were expecting it to be.

E.g., how many new users have gotten frustrated with the default setting one of your users described which doesn't allow drag-and-drop of tracks in the view? 0%? 100%? If you knew the answer and that answer motivated you to make an improvement, then that moves the software one notch away from "unintuitive" toward "intuitive."

Most open source projects probably cannot easily get the type of data needed to make these assessments with much accuracy, so they find other ways to grope toward UI improvements. Nevertheless, what non-technical users call "intuitive" is still a real thing, and they know that because they've felt the frustration of "unintuitive" UI choices eating more than their fair share of cognitive capacity.

Anyway, one feature I'd like to be addressed in DAWs is pattern based drum programming, just like we did with old drum machines in the 80s, but on steroids. I wouldn't use it for electronic music however; I'd like to quickly create patterns with an UI that for example let me show them like boxes on a flowchart (double clicking for editing), then drag, move, connect, copy them, apply variations, different time signatures, etc. The mouse interface would allow extremely quick creation and managing of a rhythm track, but unfortunately all we got is piano/drum tracks that are good for fine editing but IMO aren't the best tool when composing. They surely allow selecting areas then copying, moving etc, but in most DAWs the interface is so much crammed with objects that can be dragged and dropped that mistakes are a regular thing. We lack something in between that helps organizing drum tracks areas as patterns, then treat them as such.

I'll check that out cantabile headless thanks!

I'll check out kuriborsu!

Same for the choice of dependencies and the documentation in place, was surprised with how easy it was to compile myself. Hadn't had the time to give the program itself a full try yet, but I'm actually looking forward to do try some recordings with it next week.

With trackers, you're editing a series of events. Events can be notes, parameter changes, or commands such as "reverse this sample's playing direction now" or "move the playhead for this sample to exactly 50%". Those are common tasks when making electronic beats.

With pianorolls, everything has to be represented as a note or an automation curve. The examples I gave above become difficult to represent properly, and are often done with plugin-specific keyswitches or velocity switches. You end up with a D sharp that actually means "change to sample number 2", that kind of thing. I don't really see how it's better for working with audio clips.

https://docs.zrythm.org/md_doc_dev_windows_build.html

IANAL, but it looks like maybe the devs don't want to to register the license with Steinberg and keep this free (as in beer) licensing-wise?

This looks cool, but the barrier to entry to a bit steep under Windows. I want to make noise, not spend time messing around with building software.

Then again audacity is selling user data. Even if I'm down to pay 15$ then I can't share projects with anyone who doesn't want to pay. Folks who , since it's proven, already use Logic.