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Comment by PaulDavisThe1st | Hacker News Reader

I still don't understand (as a DAW author) how there are so many more people doing various graphics tasks on computers, and relatively speaking so few significant apps to do them with, whereas there so many fewer people doing stuff with audio and more than a dozen serious contenders for the toolbox.

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I think the lock in with audio is significantly lower than with graphical applications.

You can even tell this by the fact that there is a universe of plug-ins that work across many DAWs due to having somewhat standard interfaces.

The culture of audio creation before computers was already that you connected many devices from different manufacturers together for different specialised tasks. I mean even the term “plug-in” comes from the audio world as far as I can tell.

Reasonably true, except that in reality people move between DAWs rather rarely. The real world lock-in is quite high, even if the theoretical lock-in is lower.

I think some of the lock in is because MIDI (1.0, at least) just isn't good enough. I have an Ableton Push (Obviously locked to Ableton ... (mostly, there is 3rd party BitWig support)), Osmose (weird MPE+ standard), and a lot of pedals and effects which have their own, sort crappy apps for controlling them. (TC Plethora x3, Blackstar Dual Distortion, TD-3, etc.). Sys-ex is so strange to use that nobody want's to deal with it either.

The other half is because pretty much every DAW has some non-standard plugin/scripting system: Ableton with Max, Reaper with rJS, Bitwig with The Grid, etc. If I moved away from Ableton, I'd lose my M4L plugins/patches.

Standards for opening projcets cross Daws will help, I think, but the biggest 2 things that will motivate change is MIDI 1.0's slow death so that more is possible without strange, custom systems and CLAP, again for more-or-less the same reasons.

Uh, no.

Push is not locked to Live at all. I wrote the support for it for Ardour.

Osmose uses MPE, just like other MPE devices, and it's not weird, its actually quite elegant.

Sysex was always meant to support device specific control, so of course it's "strange". And almost every bit of MIDI software "deals with" sysex in some way.

"Pretty much every DAW has some non-standard plugin/scripting system" - there is no "standard" scripting system, and in fact most DAWs have no scripting facilities at all.

CLAP offers nothing that existing plugin APIs do not, except for modulation ala Bitwig, and since no other DAW so far can do modulation like Bitwig, the value proposition here is low (not zero, but low).

The graphic/video industry has this idea of pipeline where multiple software are used to produce something. So if tomorrow I create say a Photoshop competitor, well, professionals using Photoshop as part of their pipeline will not even bother checking my product if it doesn't integrate with say illustrator, after effects, premiere, in design... in the sense that they should be able import the dot AI in my software for a project, and if the dot AI file changes, it should also change inside my software automatically.

Adobe and their software basically dominate the graphic design pipeline, and you bet that the format they use aren't all documented.

DAW work differently. First every software is expected to have a level of support for plugins off various formats (vst, au, clap...), MIDI, and of course audio is audio. There is also an effort to create an DAW interexchange format. So this is somehow a much much more collaborative community. So there is less vendor lock-in...

Finally, each DAW is different enough that there are not really in competition with one another. Been using Logic since 1998, nothing beats it at what it does well, but I'm willing to check alternatives ;)

Audio ultimately leads to a 1D data track. Ways to play that track is comparatively well understood, and well abstracted from the workload itself. We've been using 3.5mm jack at scale since the original Walkman, for example. That's 1979.

Graphics on the other hand constantly changes. Apple II around the same timeframe had 280×192 resolution -not even 4:3 aspect ratio- and 16 color that only existed because of a hack in the NTSC spec. Now we have dozen different common aspect ratios, 2 common sizes that we have to support (mobile and monitor), dozens of different resolutions, running on thousands of different hardware, that are near impossible to test the combination of their configurations, let alone the variety of behavior that comes from their software - the list is just endless.

Audio is played by speakers, there isn't much variance. Graphics on the other hand changes constantly, and most of those changes result in throwing out a lot of software. The situation is so incredibly bad that most cross platform products threw the towel and resorted to using perhaps the second most complicated software humanity ever devised - the browser - instead of trying to get a window and a button to work on 2 different operating systems.

And don't even get me started on prints :)

> Audio ultimately leads to a 1D data track.

Do people here really not know anything about surround sound, and multichannel sound in general? Apple's new surround support? Gaming use of Ambisonics? Film scoring? Do they really not understand how you need to mix differently for phone playback, car playback and "stereo system" playback (or at least pick one because that's the best you can do) ?

Sigh.

I thought it would be easy to understand the difference between x channels that play 1D data (that remained unchanged for half a century almost) and going from 50 thousand pixels to 15 million, with dozens of different sizes and aspect ratios would be readily apparent. Alas, I was mistaken.

Sigh.

I don't pretend to know much, if anything, about the intricacies of video and graphics programming. It would be nice if people who think that audio is "x channels that play 1D data (that remained unchanged for half a century almost)" could return the same courtesy towards audio.

5.1 surround was invented in 1987. Sound mixing as we know it did not change in the same way graphics did. One should not expect courtesy if they can't offer it in the first place.

This is actually quite surprising considering how many DAWs there are and most of them are also graphically intensive. I don't think audio industry is somehow bigger.

My wild guess would be that audio attracts a lot more programmer types and there is more demand for engineering. With graphics the engineers and programmer types are in 3D. Nobody really cares about writing type rendering engines and pdf parsers.

Graphics is harder. More users means more use cases, needs to work on more platforms, layout and output to work on various resolutions/dpi, GPU/driver dependence and issues. Print, web, UI design, prototyping, photo editing, all wildly different areas, whereas audio is way narrower scope with less or more mature standards background (eg MIDI spec is 1983).

I don't know how much you know about graphics programming, but this comment is strong evidence you don't know much about audio/MIDI programming.

I don't know how much you know about audio/Midi programming, but this comment is strong evidence you don't know much about graphics programming.

My comment doesn't say anything about graphics programming, so it's pretty neutral on that particular point.

This dismissal of the complexities of audio programming is fairly common in general (and particularly bad on HN). Remarks about "less data", "less formats", "less demanding" are typical. But throwing in the specific mention of visual resolution as if somehow sample rate and depth are not more or less precise analogs seems like a fairly major red flag.

Maybe big players are not as interested in the smaller market, and none of the industry players were able to get huge like Adobe did. At least big enough to create their own gravity.

More people are passionate about making music than people passionate about making user interfaces.

For example, there're lots of photo editing apps, which also supports my premise.

DAW is easier because images and video involve more data?

120 channels of 96kHz 24 bit audio?

Also, images and video have either no timing requirements or very relaxed ones (human perceptual response to missing video frames is minimal; human perceptual response to missing audio deadlines is universal and significant).

Related: Human sensitivity to "unwanted" noise is impressive. There's a lot of professionally released music out there where the noise floor is high enough to be annoying. Similarly our reaction to lossy codecs not quite preserving quality is usually visceral if we know the track well.

I had a time when I listened to CDs that were ripped and then compressed to 128kbps MP3. One day I had the CD and just listened to it straight on the computer through headphones and was blown away by how much I was missing on the MP3. My take is 192kbps MP3 is a lot better and 320kbps is basically transparent.

I got a really great set of Yamaha speakers at our reuse center and, similarly, found a whole new world in some recordings (everything by the Super Furry Animals except their first album) but then found others (anything by Foreigner) sounded just the same as they always did on FM radio.

Even at 128, not many people can pass a double blind test. And yes, almost everyone struggles once you get somewhere in the range of 256/320.

Doing a bit of research, it looks like a majority - ~60% across studies - prefer the better quality in double blind tests at 128. At 256/320 it drops off dramatically, yes.

I know I personally have sought out better copies of some songs because the high end sounds awful, witch each hi-hat splash being a crinkly-codec failure.

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