ORIGINAL: slartabartfast
Gosh, I hate to go from the sublime to the ridiculous regarding DAW & plugin design. But am I the only one who thinks that a GUI which is a caricature of a hardware device is anachronistic and makes the human digital interface less, rather than more intuitive.
You're not the only one, no.
I understand why they'd model the GUI on a hardware device. That's what the model was. I don't know if you can totally escape doing that. Any more than you really can escape the model of layers of horizontal tracks. But there's no need to. These are not at all bad models.
The question... and the challenge... isn't how much you escape those models, but how slavishly you follow them.
Tracks flow, through outputs and sends, and are funneled down to busses, which can flow to other busses, and eventually funnel down to a single out. It's lovely. It's logical.
So you set up a GUI to follow that flow and that logic. And behind the scenes the code does the same.
And so you wind up building a software model of hardware. And you call it a DAW and it's a good and wondrous thing.
And then, slowly, it starts doing things that hardware can't do. It sprouts infinite track counts. And infinite sends. And tracks can be cloned and reordered.
And after it replaces the tape machine with its own built-in storage-retrieval, it starts doing things that tape can't do either.
And effects and processors can be added and copied infinitely and moved instantly.
And at some point you find you're no longer simply working with virtualized hardware but, increasingly, with software itself.
And so in time, software that conforms to a physical hardware model, while also allowing for software-only extras, yields to software where those post-hardware "extras" are fully accounted for in its initial design, and which echoes the harware model only to the extent it remains useful in a software context.
That's clean-sheet design.
Just one example:
Once upon a time, studios had rows and rows of patch bays that exposed every in and out in the place. And by the end of a session it was a massive tangle of cables. And if you forgot, or someone else wanted to know, what was going where, you could find one end point and feel down the cable to the other end point. And by doing that, and by looking at the buttons on the console channels, you could find out what was what. You could even document your session that way.
Now, imagine that studio without a patch bay, but with a collapsible console where the more channels you had, and the more visible they were, the less you actually saw of them.
I say that such a studio corresponds to a DAW without a functional routing matrix. And that a DAW without a functional routing matrix is, simply, not finished. And that a functional routing matrix is worth a whole lot more than lots and lots of other things.
Software is not hardware. Even when they do the same things. DAWs are software. Unnecessary adherence to a hardware model, doing things the way hardware did because that's the way it was done, and not doing things that hardware didn't do because there's no precedent for it, leaves DAWs in the dust.
post edited by Marah Mag - 2008/09/15 07:01:33