A DAW made in Excel (2020) [video] | Hacker News Reader

A DAW made in Excel (2020) [video]

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"this man gives me a reason to continue pursuing unrealistic life plans"

comment on the video.... this is nice

It's really cool. It's definitely not a DAW, it's a tracker (e.g. a sequencer).

What the actual fuck. That's amazing!

Excel turns out to be a great user interface for making music. Use the interface you probably allready know.

LOL

If you squint hard enough, ModPlug Tracker / OpenMPT kinda sorta looks like a spreadsheet https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5e/OpenMPT-... . It runs the timeline top to bottom

Not only if you squint, what he made definitely looks like a tracker.

At the risk of being a nitpick, this is not a tracker.

A tracker has one axis for time (usually down) and another for channels. Each cell is a note, the pitch of which is written as text (eg “C-5”). This lets you see and edit multiple channels quickly in the same view. That’s the distinguishing quality of trackers.

This Excel DAW appears to have a separate sheet per channel: each sheet has one axis for time and another for note pitch. In other words, it’s a piano roll. These are common in most regular DAWs but not in trackers.

In other words, the only thing this has in common with trackers is superficial, ie the grid/table look.

Yeah, a piano roll is a really good comparison. The "tracker-style" notation is much more compact (has to be, after all the first trackers ran on the Amiga in 320x200/256 resolution).

As a longtime user of MPT, I always describe it as making music on a spreadsheet

That's really cool.

Constraints drive creativity

What is a DAW?

Digital Audio Workstation, like Cubase or Logic or Ableton or Pro Tools

Or Bitwig and Reaper if you're on Linux.

or LMMS...

or Ardour...

or Renoise...

or Reddit...

Wait, Reddit is a DAW now?

The future is now, old man!

I only watched a few seconds, but there is a minor difference between a DAW and a sequencer. This looks like MIDI, and I didn't hear any real sounds, so I would call it a sequencer. Maybe there is actual recorded sounds later in the video?

Still nutty amazing.

The demo song plays a decent version of Take on Me by Aha! [0]

I have not enabled macros in an xlsx for years, but this was worth opening in safe place.

It really is a functional basic sequencer. So freaking cool! But I don't yet see the option for recording audio, so maybe not a DAW. But it does export an Ableton file. So cool.

[0] https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/18OkY-KUU6ewZOC1u-Djn...

Personally I prefer sequencer because that's what they were called back in the day. DAW to my British ears seems like a clunky Americanism that's sounds wrong both as D.A.W. and rhyming with door.

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