Research shows, in terms of music, Apple Music is second only to Spotify when it comes to market share. Apple cater to 15% of the nearly 524 million global listeners of streaming music services, but remember they were once only known as a niche computer company. What they did to go from computers to music streaming and all the additonal hardware sales (that aren’t included in that number) is a lesson in sheer business brilliance.
Brillant for one reason, to create the eco-system around Apple music wasn’t about them doing anything new, it was about them taking several disparate parts and joining the dots.
The iPod wasn’t the first MP3 player, iTunes wasn’t the first music software application, and the first downloadable music store was around a clear 10 years before Apple iTunes Store. What Apple did was connect the three things together and create the Apple music ecosystem.
A Simpler DAW
In a recent interview with Music Radar, Fender CEO Andy Mooney suggested that the software’s future could be “simpler, more intuitive and less expensive”.
He went on to say, “The simplest version of Studio One right now has a 150-page owner's manual, which I have said to the team is 149 pages too many,” he says. “Because you should be able to get out of the box, press one button and you're off to the races. So that's, again, a very easy brief, but very difficult to execute. But there has been a gravitational pull by aficionados to just keep jamming more and more features into DAWS when, in fact, I think you need to take away more features, make it simpler and more intuitive and less expensive."
He says the team at PreSonus are working on it.
In a depressingly predictable response on social media, current DAW users were suggesting every possible negative outcome from that thinking. It’s always surprising how conservative and closed-minded liberal artists can be.
Russ Hughes has been writing that it’s only a matter of time before someone does for music creation what Apple did for taking photos. By the way, since he wrote his last of several articles suggesting this shift, both Canon and Nikon are reported to be moving away from making DSLR cameras. Nikon are presently denying the report, but to even have the conversation would have been unthinkable a decade ago.
So what does a DAW for those that want music making to be a simple as using a smart phone to take pictures need to have? What things trip even the professionals sometimes? Here’s our list
Auto Input Selection
How many times has someone asked you to help them get their voice, guitar, or keyboards into their DAW, only to find they’ve not mapped and selected the right audio interface, mapped the channel and selected it? Some people fall at this first hurdle, it can be incredibly frustrating.
Auto Input selection needs to be front and centre of any DAW that’s going to be simple. Add an audio interface and it selects it and maps all the inputs. Plug something into an input and that’s mapped to a channel ready to record. It’s not hard, in fact many DAWs already recognise the audio device, Macs don’t even need a driver in many cases. Now this needs to go the extra step so as soon as you connect anything there’s a track in the DAW ready to record it… and input enabled too!
Auto Gain
Great strides are being made with audio devices that set the gain up automatically. Modern digital recording means there’s plenty of headroom so a device doesn’t have to run hot and risk clipping. There’s some great products that do this from PreSonus, Audient and Focusrite. If you don’t want to use it, then you don’t have to, but many do want this.
Taking it one step further, brands like Zoom have combined gainless pre-amps with 32bit FP to enable ‘clipless’ recording. Given the cost of storage is so cheap these days then there’s a case for making the standard setting on an easy DAW 32bit FP. Then should the audio get clipped at the digital stage then you can recover it… even better the DAW should check audio as soon as it’s recorded and de-clip automatically.
Auto Latency Control
Latency settings on a DAW are a PITA. An annoyance of using digital audio, where the user can jump between low buffer for recording and high buffer for high stress mixing. This should all be automatic, even for professional DAWs, if you want to spend time tinkering with your buffer settings then knock yourself out. No one gets a medal for making music production hard.
Audio Clean Up
Noise, AC, fans, plosives, and other stuff that can ruin a take needs to be removed. We’re spoilt for choice with low cost and smart audio clean up software. Again, some people don’t want to be bothered with forensic spectral editing, they just want it to sound better. There should be a ‘Make it Better’ button. Think we’re dreaming? Then you haven’t tried the clean up option in Descript, that’s exactly what it does and in some cases far better then the professional alternatives. It’s not perfect, but it’s getting better all the time.
Auto Mixing
With software like iZotope Neutron already on the market and other smart mixing tools, auto, or best guess mixing, auto mixing is already here. Granted it might not shave off .000005dB at 2kHz as much as you’d like, or give you endless tweaks, but for those who want the audio equivalent of Instagram filters, it’s already possible.
Mastering
Ask the average person outside of the music production bubble what mastering is and they are going to look at you with a blank expression. Ask them if they want their music to be ‘Radio Ready’ (a somewhat ironic term, given the media most stuff is played on) and they’ll ask where can they sign up.
There’s already online versions of automated mastering that set the EQ and deal with the loudness, so if you can do it online, you can do it in a DAW.
Sharing
The reason most people make music is to share it. Any simple music creation platform worth its salt has to have easy ways to share to all popular music streaming, video, and social platforms.
Summary
We know that some reading this are going to be blowing a gasket, concerned about the dumbing down of music creation, or the end of your job. The thing is, if you are a professional then you’re missing the point. The kind of people who these future technologies are aimed at are never going to walk into your studio, or pay for your mixing or mastering service. They want to take a creative idea and share it with the world. We know from the numbers of tracks on the streaming services (82 million and counting on Spotify alone, with over 60,000 added every day) that most of those people have a better chance of being Pope than they do making any money out of music, so they want/need the easiest and most cost effective route to do this.
Did the Portastudio end the recording studio? In some cases, but in most cases those buying a 4 track cassette recorder would never have had the money to hire a studio. This is just the same thing, taking the technological advancement of today to empower a new generation of creatives.
There’s an entire generation who want to make music but don’t want to get a computer science degree so they can. The sooner we find technological ways to help them, the better. Let’s be honest there’s plenty of professionals who get exasperated by the endless error messages and updates.
Oh yes, the Apple story at the start. As we look at the music technology landscape, we can see that most of the parts to this puzzle already exist, most of the technical challenges have been figured out. It just needs someone to join the dots.
A sobering lesson we can draw from the changes that have happened in the photography world - it wasn’t one of the main players from the photography industry that changed that world… it was phone manufacturers. Those making DAWs need to face this challenge head on, otherwise history may repeat itself.
Photo by Elias Lobos on Unsplash