Talk:Digital audio workstation

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

	This article is within the scope of the Professional sound production WikiProject, a collaborative effort to improve Wikipedia's coverage of the technology, equipment, companies and professions related to professional sound production. If you would like to participate, you can visit the project page, where you can join the project and see a list of open tasks.
B	This article has been rated as B-Class on the assessment scale.

This article is part of WikiProject Media, an attempt to better organize information in articles related to media. If you would like to participate, you can edit the article attached to this page, or visit the project page, where you can join the project and/or contribute to the discussion.

I would like to deposit some resources I've been working on for years on the Digital Audio Workstaion article and buff it into a central technical reference library if that's OK.

I'm intending to link it to production audio streaming and internet radio

Quinobi 20:03, 20 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Malcolmj 23:23, 1 Dec 2004 (UTC) Edited the "Overview". DAWs with proprietary hardware and software are still the most popular system in professional film and television post-production, broadcasting and recording studios.
- Please feel free to contribute stuff about the proprietary DAW systems. This article is lacking authoritative info about those. Quinobi 14:17, 4 Dec 2004 (UTC)

1 New sections
2 Open Source POV
3 Against Merging with Music Workstation
4 Sound Forge?
5 features
6 resolution

[edit] New sections

Added a few sentences on how U.S. radio industry seems to be moving towards computer-based DAWs. Created a new section entitled "Interface" so that readers have an idea of what the average computer-based DAW looks like (and how it works). It needs a lot of work. Also added links to Adobe Audition, Sound Forge, Vegas and Audacity.

-Cakewalk Sonar is missing. Br0d 11:07, 23 August 2005 (UTC)

Some readers might want to know if there are commercially-available DAWs that don't cost quite as much as the more professional (and expensive) DAWs like Audition and Pro Tools. So I added a section entitled "Commercially-available PC-Based DAWs for under $100 US." This should hopefully help people who want a little more than the open-source DAWs have to offer, but can't afford higher-end DAWs. Stephenw77 04:47, 10 August 2005 (UTC)

---

Commercial DAWs don't necessarily offer more things than open-source DAWs - yet in recent times it starts being true the contrary: open source DAWs offer more than commercial ones, and there are also commercial DAWs employing free and open source software. In fact the commercial attribute doesn't even excludes open source. Please visit the LinuxAudio.org consortium for more informations and avoid doing market advertisement to commercial companies here. Jaromil 15:01, 11 august 2005 (CET)

You make a good point, Jaromil. My main goal was distinguish higher-end (read "more expensive") DAWs from the less expensive, but still widely-used DAWs (e.g. Adobe Audition). Would anyone object to instead having something in the form of two lists: Perhaps Commercially-available high-end computer-based DAW vs. Commercially-available consumer-grade computer-based DAWs? This might make this section seem less like an advertisement. If there are still objections, I can still merge the "under $100" list back into the main "Commercially-available Mac and PC-based DAW" list - and not make any distinctions at all (the way it was originally). Stephenw77 17:40, 11 August 2005 (UTC)
- After reviewing my above post, I think that it is just better if I eliminated the distinction altogether and put everything back under the Commercially-available Macintosh and PC-based DAWs category. I did this because I realized that a lot of people in radio and the music industry actually use some of the less expensive commercial DAWs like Audition and Sound Forge -- and increasingly open-source software too (as Jaromil noted). So it just made more sense to put things back the way they were before I created the other category. If anyone can think of a better way to organize this list, by all means do so. I was thinking of making a "single-track" vs "multi-track" list, but I don't know enough about all of the DAWs listed to do something like that. Stephenw77 22:54, 11 August 2005 (UTC)
Why are people still paying for commercial DAWs then? Please let's not lean this toward an OSS/proprietary debate. I think you'd find that although open source has come a long way, if you did a feature by feature breakdown comparing major commercial DAWs to open source one's you'd find that commercial systems are still much more feature rich and reliable. Plus the business of accountability--most audio software is notoriously quirky, all other things being equal, many users would still prefer commercial versions due to the convenience of a support contract, and someone might want to point that out. All in all I believe open source is over-represented in this article, relative to its actual deployment in the wild, as it is given equivalent airtime to commercial systems, which have a much larger installed base...and I attribute that anomaly to the predictable evangelism of the open source user base. Most of the DAW world is using Protools, Nuendo, Cubase, Logic and Sonar, let's not bias an encyclopedia because we dislike paying. Not to mention the commercial paragraph is horrifically slanted and packed full of irrelevant and even incorrect information. I think this article ought to be rewritten. Protools the defacto standard on the Windows platform? Hardly. Protools is defacto on Mac. If there is a Windows standard, it is Nuendo/Cubase (whose users don't particularly need to be called "rabid" in what's supposed to amount to an informational article), although the Windows market share is a bit more fragmented than that enjoyed by Protools on Mac. Br0d

Can someone please explain me how a brand new user as Br0d, completely unknown and only contributing to digital audio since 2 days, can put a dispute sign on top of an article like this? i think that if wikipedia works this way we have little or no hope to provide correct information. I thank in advance anyone pointing me to the policy regarding this issue. Besides this basic procedural problem, i argue that Br0d assumptions are made on the basis of his specific background as commercial software user. There are various research institutions and universities employing and developing free and open source software in the "professional" field, employing instruments that are precise and can be calibrated because open source. Br0d is writing about consumer-grade DAWs and should simply contribute to that section if he feels he knows about. Jaromil ~ 24 Aug 2005

Um, this is rather silly. Some research institutions and universities are employing open source? Great! Call me when research institutions and universities represent any kind of serious percentage of the DAW-using world and I'll consider that relevant. This article is horribly, horribly biased towards open source - and I'm saying this as a Linux user all the time when I'm not doing professional audio work. This article has a shocking over-emphasis on Audacity, which arguably isn't even a DAW in any serious sense of the word - being a wave editor and closer to a free version of SoundForge than of something like ProTools, Logic, DP, Sonar or Cubase/Nuendo. The balance in this article is utterly horrible, and if you doubt this it is most certainly YOUR experience of the real world that is lacking. I suggest you get the phone book out and conduct a brief straw-poll of local studios to see what they're using. ProTools is the de-facto industry standard, generally running on Macs but basically being a dedicated hardware platform to itself. On the PC with consumer hardware you're much more likely to see Cubase/Nuendo or Sonar, on the Mac with consumer hardware you can expect to see Logic or occasionally Digital Performer. Ardour you will not see. Audacity you will not see. If you want a citation for that, try looking at this page here: http://www.soundonsound.com/articles/Technique.php - note the presence of Cubase, Logic, DP, ProTools, and Sonar columns. Note the lack of virtually anything discussed in this article. That's a professional perspective from one of the most well-respected industry magazines. This whole article is shockingly, shockingly biased and quite clearly should have a dispute sign on it. Finnhiggins 08:36, 13 June 2006 (UTC)

Pro Tools is by no means an 'industry standard' - no standards body has EVER decided that; it is, however an industry leader at the moment in the DAW world. :-) Neilius 11:27, 13 June 2006 (UTC)

Well, I did say "De-facto" - it's not a formal standard, but if you want to be taking your projects from home into a pro studio it's a pretty safe assumption that you want to be taking them in as ProTools project files. Sort of like Microsoft's .doc and .xls file formats - not an official standard, but very much THE standard professionally. 04:33, 16 June 2006 (UTC)

I'm also sure universities do represent a large portion of the DAW using world, as I work at one myself and we have around 50 machines each running Logic Pro 7, which is a lot of licenses. We also have a couple of Pro Tools suites. If you think about how many universities there are that run courses that require DAWs, and then imagine the number of licenses they require for this software, I'm sure it can be said that universities would make up a substantial portion of the market. Neilius 16:42, 13 June 2006 (UTC)

"Why are people still paying for commercial DAWs then?"

Because the open source audio world is buggy, unreliable, and perpetually beta. :-) I definitely agree with the allegations of bias, but don't delete information, just add more about commercial systems to balance it out. — Omegatron 14:11, August 23, 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Open Source POV

Much of the discussion on open-source DAWs seems to be slanted against open source. Being something of an OSS zealot myself, I've tried to straighten it out, but I fear all I've created is a mishmosh of opposing viewpoints, not a true NPOV entry. Anyone else want to take a hack at that? Haikupoet 01:45, 2 August 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Against Merging with Music Workstation

I would like to point out that DAWs are used in many industries that only tangentially work with sound, such as film and theater sound design, and radio an TV production. Most dialogue and ADR editors never work with music in their DAWs, and some DAWs are targeted at post-production while some are targeted at music. When I hear "music workstation," I think of an Akai sampler or a Fairlight CMI, but a DAW can be a Pro Tools, or a Nuendo, or a WaveFrame for that matter. Iluvcapra 07:15, 11 December 2005 (UTC)

Agreed. Two different types of products, aimed at different (largely overlapping, sure, but still different) markets. Software DAW is a sequencer, software for nonlienar audio editing and production, a sound design platform, postproduction/mastering platform.. Hardware music workstations in perspective seem like a temporary solution to sequencing before the total overtake by soft sequencers, and lately they seem more and more aimed at hobbyists and songwriters that dislike/fear computers but are in need of a sketch pad for thier musical compositons. Merging the two just "feels" awkward. -- Guest

[edit] Sound Forge?

Why is Sound Forge and CoolEdit in the list of DAWs? They are not DAWs except in perhaps the most stretched definition. They are wave editors. Same would probably go for SAW, but I'm not as familiar with that program so I couldn't be sure about that. --Brentt 23:15, 28 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] features

I started to added to the sections on features. I.e. what is it that a DAW can do? I would like to add more about non-destructive editing, non-linear playback (i.e. jump to any part of the record instaneously), non-real time processing (faster and slower), and 'impossible' or very difficult things do do in the absence of a DAW eg timestretching, (real-time) pitch-shifting pitch correction, linear-phase EQ, look-ahead dynamics processing, plugin delay compensation..... i'm sure there is more, please contribute if you can. Iain 11:06, 12 July 2006 (UTC)