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Comment by smoldesu | Hacker News Reader

Same goes for music production. I've tried using a few iPad DAWs over the years, but it's so much slower than using a keyboard and mouse, or just popping open your Macbook with Live. Apple already has a product segment that does fairly well with this market, trying to force the iPad into being something it's not just looks silly.

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I see a lot of people using an iPad for music alongside a proper computer with a full featured DAW. You don't need a mouse or keyboard shortcuts for idea generation, sketching out rough concepts from inspiration on the go or playing with some of the pretty unique synths & other tools available on iPad. For modular synth simulation I've found iPad with Pencil to be a much much better UI for me than using a mouse.

Producing may be faster on desktop for now because they've had a large head start on optimizing the interfaces for mouse and keyboard, but those affordances are still a subset of what you can do with a touch screen. Touch screens won't replace dedicated controllers with physical knobs, but digital knobs are surprisingly usable.

> but those affordances are still a subset of what you can do with a touch screen.

I disagree. A gesture-based workflow won't replace Pro Tools' keyboard shortcuts, unfortunately.

Touch is far better for performance though. Watching Suzanne Ciani seamlessly integrate her Buchla modular rig with the ipad makes me appreciate just how good the ipad is. A regular computer would be far more cumbersome to use with hardware synths in the moment.

Not really? The iPad isn't velocity-sensitive, and it doesn't have aftertouch or any tactile feedback. A "regular computer" at least has straightforward MIDI routing that you can perform with - the iPad gets outclassed by decade-old Octatracks in terms of performance flexibility.

Ciani is the perfect example that I was about to bring up myself. I got to see her perform live at a conference, and out of her whole setup, she waxed poetic most about her iPad.

Similar things were probably said about smartphones with touch screens being inferior to physical buttons.

After using my tablet as a second screen for production, photo editing, CADing, and coding, it's become woefully apparent that the mouse - a tiny singular cursor - is an inferior grandfather to an interface that _also_ supports multitouch, and the only thing holding tablets back is software. Obsidian is a good example of a mobile app that has parity with its desktop version in both maintaining its keyboard shortcuts but also enabling touch interactions closer to the affordances of physical notes.

Let's check in again in a few device generations.

Think live performance instead of DAW work. Using a sequencer, effects, or additional soft synths on the ipad along with hardware synths is much nicer than fiddling with a mouse or trackpad.

"Much nicer" is a bit of a stretch (I use a touchscreen laptop with my DAW). The difference between clicking-and-dragging a knob is not that different from tapping-and-dragging one. Same goes for performance; the iPad is not velocity sensitive, and it does not have aftertouch. At that point, you're probably adding in a MIDI keyboard or other hardware, at which point you may as well just perform with a real DAW and leave the iPad at home.

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