Hosts & Applications (Sequencers, DAWs, Audio Editors, etc.) • Re: VirtualDAW

I clearly stated, that my DAW will be made for those, who want to start making modern music and who only have a laptop and maybe some headphones. That's how creativity starts.
And the modern styles I design this DAW for (EDM, HipHop, Dance, Techno, Trance and similar) simply do not necessarily need any physically analog devices. There are very good soft-synths and royalty-free samples out there.
Even for vocals you simply can use royalty free samples or if you do official remixes (e.g. for contests), you simply get stems, which then you modify and extend with plugins.

I think you should more analyze your target group. Beginners want an affordable DAW - yes. But they want also an all-in-one solution with crazy good effects, crazy good instruments and maybe even samples. Do you really think a beginner wants to mess with doing recherche on third-party open-source SW? No beginners want an easy starting point, though well equipped and they also want many tutorials on YT available and beeing able to exchange their projects with friends and exisiting eco-system. Nothing you can deliver with your idea as it is.

And therefore the DAW will be much more affordable, since the device driver communication part for those analog devices is not needed to be implemented.

No it will be not. Device driver communication and what you want to skip else is just 1% of an DAW. And it's crazy ridiculous. Implementing a DAW without ASIO and MIDI support in the 1st place is like wanting to implement a graphics programm without supporting input drawing devices and graphics card support. And as stated by others before. Starting cheap and eaysy is pretty well covered with Garage Band, Ableton Light, and all the other entry versions of all DAWs. So how do you think your solution will be that special, that one is even willing to spend one buck?

I please all of those, who simply do not need a lightweight and streamlined "virtual" DAW to no longer call me names. Thank you for your input, but you are not the ones, my project will be made for. I want to help those, who really struggle to afford all that expensive gear.
Thank you for your understanding.

So you present your idea on a public forum and as soon as critical voices appear, you call them to shut up? Good Luck with your project!

Furthermore DAWs are very complex programs developed with a team.

Orion wasn't and it comes closest to meeting my needs of all the host applications I have tried.

This was meant, that all DAWs in itself are complex ond no easy freetime projects. I don't know Orion, but I am sure even that has needed a couple of man years to implement. Not a thing you are making as one person beside your job in your freetime in one year.

Honestly - a lightweight under-featured DAW is the last thing the world is waiting for IMHO.

Certainly if it is under-featured but if it has all the basics and does it well, I think there is plenty of scope for it to be successful. There is currently no product on the market, at least nothing I am aware of, that comes close to giving me what I want from my DAW.

You are not the target group of this guy. Target group are beginners who want to save money and never ever need audio input or MIDI. Are you the guy who wants to draw notes in the piano roll? Ah wait, it hasn't even that before phase 2. So you have VST instruments but no MIDI input, no MIDI record and no piano roll, just can import MIDI files.
And I'm pretty sure, you also don't want to record audio with another tool and then import it. No - for this idea with this feature set there is definitely no market.

BTW, for Orion it seemed there wasn't a big market either, at least according to the words of Richard.

We're not developing Orion "as it is" beyond version 8.6, so that's the last update for now. There is far too little interest in Orion (from legit users anyway). We have a magnitude more plugin users than Orion users, and those users demand updates/bugfixes/future developments as well. As professional developers we can't afford to ignore 95% of our userbase in favor of the 5% or less using Orion. Of course that sucks since we love Orion and use it every single day, but we have to accept the reality as it is, not as we'd like it to be.
Note that we do have plans for a new sequencer, but that'll take quite some time for sure.

So why should there be one for the next 58th half-baken-thought-out DAW?

Statistics: Posted by SamDi — Sat Jan 25, 2025 9:17 am

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