We just came back from the AES conference and a very exciting week in Silicon Valley. We had organized a quite well-received (as we were told) panel about “Rethinking the Digital Audio Workstation“. Out came very interesting ideas from an entertaining panel and (not so usual for AES conferences) from the audience, which did not stop firing questions at the panelists.

(From right to left) Allan Saego suggested a greater review of the design of future DAWs by applying heuristic evaluation principles, such as put together by Nielsen and Molich. Bernard Mont-Reynaud suggested that DAWs should get more auditory intelligence: If a DAW would be aware of the content that the user is editing, it could rid the user from many elaborate re-occurring tasks such as finding the best take out of several recordings. Joern Loviscach shared his observations on “Impedance Mismatches” in common DAW software: As audio content is essentially non-visual, audio editors are much harder to design than for instance dtp, image or video editing software. Last but not least, Guy McNally, after admitting that it might partially be his fault that today’s DAWs are so overcomplicated suggested a radical change to the resulting output of DAW software. With the rise of the smartphone, he suggested, the days of a linear, non-interactive audio experience should finally be over, and he implied that DAWs from now on should create apps rather than songs.

From here again thanks to all our panelists. Of course we couldn’t have such a exciting discussion without reviewing a bit of DAW history, so here for your viewing pleasure, from the the days when screens were monochrome:

We are also honored that our CEO Michael Hlatky was elected for chairing the AES Technical Committee on Human Factors in Audio Systems. We hereby also want to thank William Martens for his great work as the prior chair.