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Comment by wdfx | Hacker News Reader

I understand the frustrations with the current DAW offerings. Many of them have a very long history in taking over where the analogue tape machine left off.

Some have developed much further though to support a more digital-first approach.

But it's true that the barrier to entry can still be very high. Trying to explain any of these packages to a musician who is not also a computer power user is extremely challenging, believe me I've tried.

If we could arrive at a point where a DAW can be intuitive to a musician and not technically overwhelming that would be very interesting.

What would be more interesting though would be if that same project could be viewed in an "engineer mode" which exposes the technical view for someone else to work on at a different level.

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Exactly! It's too high a barrier to entry. And it doesn't matter how low that barrier is: if people won't use it due to it, that's too high. Crazy how much pushback I get on that idea.

As far as the "engineer mode" that's what I think galls me most: You can't really write audio software without all of the technical stuff so you're going to NEED that stuff anyway. AND, as someone matures in their musical ability, they often need to do more specific fine-tuning which would require those features. And that means that you could basically funnel non-audio-engineers into understanding at least the parts they need to make their own music when the time came. There's no better way to learn than to solve a "problem", even if that "problem" is just "how do I tighten up the high end on this so it makes this cool sound I want?"

In short: making a DAW for musicians is not only accessible to non-audio-engineers, it's also a gateway drug to semi-audio-engineers and their explorations. I'm just all for that!

Dare I say it but perhaps some sort of natural language input would be interesting here.

If the software was primarily driven by a command list back-end, had a bunch of semi-preset solutions to common problems, and also could be "spoken to" - would that feel more comfortable for our musician user?

I could definitely see it! I would think that voice commands would be more for the musician side of it, such as "start", "stop", "cut", "redo", "alternate", stuff like that. Don't really need tensors for that. But yeah, once they have a question about "how do I...?", you can layer in some of the latest DeepSeek-style chain-of-thought stuff and probably get some actually useable results with it.

Still though, all of that is a layer AFTER that initial barrier to entry.

> how do I...?

Even this is still a problem, because it's unlikely they know even what question to ask. Or if a sensible question is asked it may be an XY problem, where what is really intended is not what is asked.

Having thought about this for the last few minutes, it does seem inevitable that the software would have to start coaching the musician in the ways of the engineering and of "music software" people, so that the inputs become more accurate and aligned with the outcomes the software is capable of providing.

I think everyone would crave becoming more productive in the environment over time and not have to suffer the initial baby steps forever.

It's very difficult to imagine a DAW environment which exposes deeper functionality that is not already like a lot of the existing packages.

Edit: and one final thought - it's a hard environment to build by the nature of the work being done being a creative process with no correct answers and which needs to support a multitude of different approaches to creativity. It's pretty opposed to software being generally a machine with a fixed number of functions

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