DAWproject: Open exchange format for DAWs

https://github.com/bitwig/dawproject

by anigbrowl • 3 years ago

187 89 3 years ago

github.com

allears• 3 years ago

Nice idea, but not useful unless each DAW manufacturer supports the format. And there are a lot of DAWs.

phero_cnstrcts2• 3 years ago

Well, you have to start somewhere.

noizejoy• 3 years ago

MIDI was enthusiastically supported by Yamaha and Roland, two of the biggest synth players of that era.

So I imagine, for it to become widely successful, that this new standard would need the wholehearted support of at least 2 of Steinberg, Apple, Ableton, and Avid.

surfingdino• 3 years ago

Indeed, MIDI 1.0 is one of the oldest implemented standards in existence. Unfortunately, MIDI 2.0 is not as successful. Let's hope Bitwig's initiative takes off.

sedivy94• 3 years ago

Maybe I’m misinterpreting the readme but other DAWs would not need to cooperate if you’re developing a tool to transpile between formats. I think most of the proprietary specs could be reverse engineered.

izenme• 3 years ago

XML, why?

And... 99% of the issues will be around plug-in management.

hellotheretoday• 3 years ago

Probably a relic of the musicxml format which still holds some popularity in programs based around sheet music/western notation

follower• 3 years ago

On the subject of MusicXML, there is currently ongoing work to develop a successor (currently named MNX): https://w3c.github.io/mnx/docs/

brtkdotse• 3 years ago

XML is fine. Schema validation is really handy more often than you’d think.

speedgoose• 3 years ago

You can do schema validation with other formats too.

For example you have JSON Schema, that many people experience through Kubernetes.

anigbrowl• 3 years ago

Did someone say plugins https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLever_Audio_Plug-in

phero_cnstrcts2• 3 years ago

What would you propose? Json?

steve19772• 3 years ago

Why not?

rebolek• 3 years ago

easy to parse, supported by basically anything and not a shitty format like YAML for example

royjacobs• 3 years ago

This is pretty nice. I've written some tools for my own softsynth that revolved around parsing various DAW formats and having a standard format, even just to export to, would have been very nice to have.

ckbishop• 3 years ago

Bitwig is quickly becoming my favorite DAW. Big fan of how they develop software.

lagniappe• 3 years ago

Bitwig knocked it out of the park coming out the gate with Linux support. Can't say I'm surprised though, it's made by the original team that made Ableton Live.

steve19772• 3 years ago

Bitwig was founded by people who were previously working for Ableton. Some longer, some less long.

But they were not the original team that made Live, that is a bit misleading.

IndySun• 3 years ago

"Bitwig ... founded by Claes Johanson, Pablo Sara, Nicholas Allen and Volker Schumacher. Our experience in the computer music software industry includes Ableton, where we were all part of the development team behind the successful music software Live ... "

mxmilkiib• 3 years ago

On Linux it steals/hogs the hardware MIDI, so you can't connect to it with other JACK MIDI apps.

conradfr2• 3 years ago

Although the Spectral Suite drama was a poor move from them.

ace2358• 3 years ago

It’s honestly one of my favourite bits of software these days. Feels very respectful and responsive. I tired logic and ableton. Both are great tools but a bit janky.

Never though I’d say I love a Java program but they did a really really good job.

pjmlp• 3 years ago

And a very cool project of what can be done in Java based desktop software.

Yes it has has C++ under the hood, which is also a good example of how not to go full into a single stack, rather mix-and-match.

thrtythreeforty2• 3 years ago

It also has an LLVM-based JIT compiler for Grid devices. Which I would love to see a deep dive on, if Bitwig folks would like to write an engineering blog.

dmicah2• 3 years ago

It would be nice if Bitwig would support existing plug-ins formats like AU.

sctb• 3 years ago

Do you encounter many AU-only plugins? From what I can tell, the limitations of VST/AU/AAX are more pressing and Bitwig are working to address that with CLAP: https://u-he.com/community/clap.

unshavedyak2• 3 years ago

Man i hope more people (plugin developers too) embrace CLAP or something open. I'm writing a Rust program and i really want to allow for Modart's Pianoteq plugin and VST just makes it feel so difficult.

dmicah2• 3 years ago

There have always been plug-ins, especially by small developers on the Mac, which are AU only.

Apple Silicon macs can now run iOS / iPadOS AUs as well, so there are a ton of plugins from that world that are not available as VSTs.

Apple Logic can't load VSTs, so typically on the Mac it makes sense to just have AUs. Ableton Live on the Mac can load VSTs or AU, but there isn't really a reason to keep the VSTs around.

duped4• 3 years ago

Fewer hosts should use AU

teilo2• 3 years ago

Why would they want to support AU? The only reason to use AU is Logic. Everything else (Protools excepted) supports VST, and all the plugin devs release in VST and AU, so it would be a waste of time. Bitwig is putting their time into CLAP, and for good reason. It's cross-platform, much easier to develop against, and much more advanced that all the alternatives. Even Avid has shown interest in CLAP. So has Image Line. I expect Studio One to support it in v7.

jonpalmisc2• 3 years ago

For starters, AUs are "easier" to run under Roestta than VSTs since AUs run out-of-process by default. This means you can use a x86_64 AU without running the entire DAW under Rosetta on Apple Silicon.

odiroot• 3 years ago

Or LADSPA/LV2 which is actually free.

elihu8• 3 years ago

One thing I'd like to see is native support for some notion of pitch other than 12-tone equal temperament.

Looking at their example, I see this:

...which looks like it's basically just a representation of the underlying midi.

One way they could represent other pitches is for "key" to allow a floating point value rather than an integer. So, for instance, 65.5 would be a quarter-tone (50 cents) above note 65.

According to their reference document, "key" is currently required to be an integer:

https://htmlpreview.github.io/?https://github.com/bitwig/daw...

There's other ways to support microtuning. They could apply a tuning table to the midi notes, for instance. (Ideally they should support more than the 128 notes that midi supports, because 128 isn't enough for some use cases.) They might also allow you to apply pitch bend to individual notes (which isn't allowed in midi 1.0 but was added to 2.0).

gravitronic2• 3 years ago

At this layer of note information, fact is the data will be either sent to a MIDI device or a plugin as a MIDI event, so you might as well keep it in the native format and not convert to a frequency.

londons_explore• 3 years ago

I feel like we're only months/years away from software and file formats being obsolete for this for this sort of thing, and instead songs are composed by humming a tune to ChatGPT and have it add all the other instruments, some nice vocals, and output the MP3.

If you want to make changes, you give ChatGPT the MP3 file and say "switch out the trumpet for a piano and make the singer a guy".

spacechild1• 3 years ago

You don't need to convert to frequency, you can use fractional MIDI pitch values. E.g. 60.5 would be a quarter tone above middle C.

In fact, the VST2 and VST3 SDKs support microtonal offsets per note event (measured in cent). Unfortunately, only few plugins and hosts support it.

elihu8• 3 years ago

MPE exists, and can handle microtuning of pitch. MIDI 2.0 supports per-note pitch bend. Old multitimbral MIDI synths can be used in an MPE-like fashion by using the one-note-per-channel and pitch bend trick. Modular synthesizers (and virtual modular synthesizers like VCVRack) use control voltage directly, which has no built-in assumptions about how or if the voltages are quantized.

Microtonal music, or even just plain regular traditional music that's tempered to be more in tune with itself, should be trivially easy to do with electronic instruments, and yet due to some historical decisions to base the one near-universal music protocol we've been using for the last 40 years on a piano-centric representation, it's a lot harder than it ought to be.

I think we should not disregard microtonal music just because it isn't cleanly backwards compatible with a protocol that's over 40 years old.

duped4• 3 years ago

This is built into MIDI 2, fwiw

elihu8• 3 years ago

Yeah, MIDI 2.0 has per-note pitch bend. They kept with 7 bits for note numbers, though, which is kind of inconvenient. If you have an instrument with more than 128 keys, you have to do a kind of dynamic allocation thing where you find the nearest unused key and bend it to pitch.

I think for most use cases, MPE is actually simpler. (Also it's probably supported by more instruments and synths at this point.)

All the more reason to include microtuning as a supported feature in this new format.

an_aparallel• 3 years ago

A DAW that utilises ODD-SOUND's MTS-ESP should be something all DAW's support. International music styles are suffering in DAW-land imo :(

https://oddsound.com/

CharlesW2• 3 years ago

If the goal is widespread industry adoption, I'd recommend the approach of extending a professional, standards-based interchange format already supported by major DAWs: AAF.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Authoring_Format

https://www.loc.gov/preservation/digital/formats/fdd/fdd0000...

conradfr2• 3 years ago

The README extensively references AAF.

thrtythreeforty2• 3 years ago

Indeed. This is a Bitwig project. I think the default for Bitwig engineering should be "assume extreme competence."

CharlesW2• 3 years ago

Yes, which is why the Yet Another Standard approach is so mystifying. Bitwig is surely aware that AAF has wide support and could easily be extended to support everything they want to do.

devthane• 3 years ago

I found it interesting to discover that an Ableton Live project file is a gzipped xml file as well, so you can get at the xml by gunzipping it.

I've played around with trying to generate a schema file from a project file with mixed results.

I very much wish Ableton would support this format or at least publish their schema somewhere so translation could be done.

r92952• 3 years ago

This. I've been trying to write a VCS for Ableton projects but their schema is way too complex to try to make sense of it.

Ableton is incredibly hostile to third party devs building upon their work. Eg: There is no official documentation for any of their Python APIs.

thomashop2• 3 years ago

Although the python API could be documented, it was not meant to be a public API. And it seems the open source community managed to generate the documentation.

I don't know any other DAW that allows as deep integration for third party devs through their Max for Live API.

dottjt• 3 years ago

Incredible. If Ableton adopts this it'll be a huge thing.

xoac• 3 years ago

Probably not happening any time soon. Bitwig’s potential for growth is in users migrating from Ableton Live and making that easier is likely not in Ableton’s interest.

raincole• 3 years ago

It sounds nice but I don't know how they're going to convince other DAWs devs (bigger than Bitwig) to adopt this.

throwaway2902• 3 years ago

If Reaper and Bitwig supported one interchangeable arrangement format it could already be big.

Borgz• 3 years ago

The readme says that PreSonus Studio One supports the format, so I think it's possible others might in the future.

dzonga• 3 years ago

why do applications prefer zipped xml's ?

what are the advantages and disadvantages ?

bobim• 3 years ago

Yes please! I went for Mixcraft because friend has it already, but still struggling to make it running alongside Spitfire with wine. Spitfire needs win 10 but then no sound with the "low latency" driver in Mixcraft. Anyway… an exchange format would help me go native while keeping friends!

crazal• 3 years ago

oh my god thank you

sim7c00• 3 years ago

epic project, one of my fav DAWs already supported too. So damn happy to see this. Hope Renoise will pick it up too though that one moves a lil slow :P maybe someday! just wanted to say thanks. this is needed sooo much!

DAWproject: Open exchange format for DAWs

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