With "AI" creating tracks, they're all in danger if it really takes off.

 

Studio One. PT is too expensive. Logic is mac only. Reaper is for nerds. Cubase is for house people. FL is for beatmakers. S1 has it all.

 

AI is not going to stop people from playing and recording real instruments. Purely synthetic/computer music has been around for 30+ years already. There will be even more mediocre junk, cranked out faster than ever. But it does not do anything a producer with 5-10 people working for them cannot do already.

 

Doesn't all this go back to the internal architecture of this DAW? Wouldn't it be better if the creator of this DAW paid attention to the architecture of e.g. Cubase and took inspiration from it instead of the wrong architecture that ruled this tool from the beginning?

Only after 15 years, the creator of this DAW realized his mistake and tries to make changes to it to be closer to Cubase. But unfortunately, because he did not think about this problem from the beginning, the architecture of this DAW went forward from the beginning and faced the manufacturer with an almost unsolvable problem. That's why, despite the many features that are in this tool, because its architecture is problematic, it has not been noticed by many customers.

 

I don't know what market you're refering to. All the people I talk to use Ableton, Bitwig, or sometimes Renoise (granted, a lot of them are making electronic music).

 

Maybe your friends are more interested in electronic music. The music industry is vast, but most of the music economy lies elsewhere.

 

There is nothing wrong with ImageLine and FL Studio. They are making good money, despite the free lifetime updates. Recently, they have bought UVI, Melda and WA production. So, that business model is working great for them. For the architecture thing, you already got four DAWs with similar workflows, why do you want FL Studio to became one of them? The way FL Studio is designed, it is very flexible. It doesn't impose rules and it does not force you to do things a certain way. Do you want one instrument per track in Playlist? no worries. You want all the instrument in single track, nothing is going to stop you other than you getting lost in the piles of patterns. There many more such things. That Piano roll is amazing. I wonder why other DAWs don't just copy it. That functionality should be a standard.

To me, the only major thing where FL Studio requires serious work is Audio recording. It is not very intuitive and it was hard to set up before FL Studio 21, but it has become a bit more easier now. Though still far from good as compared to the conventional DAWs.

Anyways, I believe none on these DAWs are going anywhere. Most people make music as hobby and for fun and rarely make any money. So unless people loose interest in music as hobby, the tools will remain and thrive.

 

Pre-DAW Tommy = A demo quality song per day.
DAW Tommy = Worthless tidbits of audio snippets. No songs completed since 2003. Endlessly searching for the magic workstation that does not exist. I wish I had the guts to run over my entire studio with a Mack truck and purchase an old tape deck.

In answer to your question . . . NONE of them are worthy IMO to take over anything else. They've already taken over my life.

 

I like Studio One, but in my opinion since Fender bought Presonus I have a feeling innovation in the S1 area will fall by the wayside, unfortunately........

 

Once you have created 500+ projects in Cubase the choice becomes kind of immaterial. I won't live long enough to convert all those projects to exactly the same thing in another DAW. I'm quite satisfied with Cubase but regardless, others DAW's are simply not an option.

 

Agreed, if they can come up with a pseudo "One DAW to rule them all" that will open any project format, then you might would see a lot of people changing over, but like you all my projects are in the DAW I use "Pro Fools" so I guess there I'll be.......hoping a new version will eventually pop up on the scene.....

 

What they are doing is basically what I did 10 years ago but limited to their systems. What I do and have been doing 2015 is trying to simply break open the Daw market and allow me without your plugin to use your plugin and patch audio through your outboard gear across the internet. Right now this is possible but not with a full interface to your plugin because of plugin licensing. I can send audio to your Daw and routed audio through a VST without breaking any licensing issues but the VST licensing does not allow a secondary interface to plugins.

The way I am bypassing these idiotic licenses is with tightvnc so I can fully remote control the plugins on the remote machines without running into any licensing issues. With a good network you do not need 1 single VST installed on a Daw, the VST's are all only on the remote machines and you can manage this node network by installing the heavier cpu plugins on the better machines and install the lighter cpu ones on the less powerful machines.

This has massive advantages as :

1. No need to install the VST or VSTi's on your main Daw
2. No Audio interfaces required on the remote machines ( all the remote machines running rearoute asio)
3. Different OS can be used Linux, Mac and Windows nodes.
4. Only the main Daw desktop requires an Interface with multiple outs.
5. Remote machines can be local or on the internet.

Now my point on this is for us in the Audio Daw world to have a worldwide network available for us to basically send audio and receive it after passing either through VST's or actually physical hardware either free or to pay studios for access to their own VST's or to pass our mixes through their hardware all in real time without anyone having issues with any licensing issues.

The key here is where the plugin developers and hardware developers will see themselves in 20 years with this industry basically dying a slow death, with many instrument companies going out of business, stores closing and the general public not really getting into older audio recording or mixing methods I think they would be onboard with us. With Social Media taking over video and audio there is no question that the next 20 years will drop many companies and developers behind.

accessanalog.com is using a 10 year old idea however they had to wait for the tech to arrive and the backing for the remote control hardware for the pots and dials. The only downside of this is that each user requires one single remote hardware machine ( no multi-client of course).

That's the future of Audio Mixing and like I said been at this for more than 10 years minus the robotic remote control part of it. I talked to 2 studios and they are fully onboard with this remote access but they also want their plugins to be accessed as well, they feel plugins are less expensive to repair and can be rented out with multi client installations. One owner said he would have his outboard gear as premium accounts and his plugins for normal users.

Audio mixing will indeed go online based and now with more faster connections this is becoming a reality but VST and VSTi developers need to allow multi client and remote client panels for their plugins, this is simply non existing right now.

 

Last edited: Dec 2, 2024

All the reaper fanboys will be here to say reaper.

No doubt it's a very good DAW and you can tailor it to your needs but it also looks very dated with its million menus. It's not going to be the standard of anything.

Pro Tools will likely remain the standard of major studios because most of them run hybrid studios where their analog gear is linked with their pro tools rig. They're not gonna start undoing all that now.

As for your average DAW user that's working at home, I don't imagine things will change much. The choices will be varied like now

 

my gosh as long as the world will not going into major shifts all mentioned DAWs will be on and be sold from bedroom to abey road
---
isnt pro tools more an american thing and in europe more cubase as standart in big studios ?
and in the end they have licenses for every DAW , depending on costumer .
....but whats that tolatarian approach for sake of project compatiblity wtf...?
i like choices....

 

CSIRAC, it's the future past..

 

I'd say FL Studio it's the one DAW that really caters to Gen Z with the endless helpful tools to create and limitless tutorial videos on how to achieve certain sounds. They also have just about every popular genre co-signed by a producer who uses FL to make music, it's one of those DAWs that for someone with no musical background can make music in no time. The one caveat for me with FL is the fact it's a non linear DAW and the constant clicking in and out of windows is annoying to me but in saying that once you get used to the shortcut keys and other efficient tricks the is workflow quick.

Studio One I feel has been trying to tap into the Gen Z market with some of the new features they've added to make them seem more modern etc and then of course Cubase fired back and copied some of Studio One's workflow with their new Pattern Editor. For me I really enjoy Cubase and Studio One I use them both but Cubase is the total package for me as far as having everything I need without having use third party plugins if I couldn't afford them. Cubase has it's own Auto-Tune, VocAlign, and VST instruments then you have all of the composing tools lol to me Cubase should've been called Pro Tools with everything it can do but none the less it's severely underrated in this day and age because of marketing of Ableton and FL for example. There's plenty of options now days for people looking for certain tools and key features to create music inside of whatever DAW they choose and another solid one to mention is Logic Pro if they ever came back to PC then maybe we'd be having a different discussion

 

No doubt people will always be playing and recording real instruments, as thats part of the fun, and people do it for joy. However, AI can do a lot more than a producer with 5 people working for them. Im not aware of a single producer that can give me four options of "hybrid cinematic drum and bass disco with a latin pop top line" in a matter of minutes.

 

It's just faster, like a force multiplier. It is still constrained by all the same things a person using a DAW is. All you just described is like a VBA macro for midi notes.

 

The four that you mention have been going strong for years, decades. Pro Tools is used almost exclusively by pros in studios, however, because it got there first. Because Logic Pro is made by Apple, it has started to incorporate A.I, features, albeit at the expense of the Intel architecture – M1 being also an Apple technology. However, Logic Pro is not cross-platform. Cubase and Studio One are maintaining their user-base. You neglect to mention Ableton Live, whose market has been defined by its functional design (which others, such as Bitwig, have sort of imitated). You also neglect to mention Reaper, which has more of a "grassroots" following due to its price, low system demand, and customizability. It doesn't appear that development on any of the major DAWs is not remaining consistent; even Ardour's development is assiduous. I would say that the longevity of any DAW would depend upon its not being too proprietary and exclusive of backward compatibility of architecture and operating systems; also upon its being cross-platform. More DAWs are being coded for Linux now, which is good to see.