In other words, your favorite Markdown editor doesn't replace Microsoft Word — but that's hardly the goal!
There's already an industry standard for that - Avid Sibelius. If you're composing in a traditional manner, a DAW probably isn't the right tool.
Classical notation was fantastic for use with pen & paper when music was much more conservative and on-the-beat. But we have computers now. We can come up with something better — whether it's software like StaffPad[1] as a first step or something even farther removed from classical paradigms.
I've also written a bit about this in my blog[2]. Frustration with classical notation was one of the reasons why I worked on my own "anti-DAW" music app. (Though it's a somewhat less ambitious project than Helio.)
[1]: http://staffpad.net
[2]: http://beta-blog.archagon.net/2016/02/05/composers-sketchpad...
Sibelius has fairly good support for swing, shuffle and irregular meter. It has natively supported quartertones since version 6; plugins provide good support for alternative tunings and microtonal composition. Classical notation can get clumsy if you're doing really weird things, but "really weird" is a higher bar than you'd expect.
If you're using timbre as a fundamental expressive element, then a DAW is probably the right tool. At present, we have no useful system for notating synthetic timbres.
Other new tools like Staffpad are amazing, but they serve a somewhat different market.
The idea is to identify large sets of tools that can be replaced with a handful of powerful combinable tools to perform the same tasks - this is not always easy but if done well can end up not only simplifying UI but providing more powerful, intuitive tools and reducing unnecessary learning.
I think Modo has done this fairly well in this regard for 3D modelling and animation (programs which tend to be notoriously full of thousands of discrete tools).
This is not limited to DAWs. 3D animation packages, photo editing and video editing packages all historically have this problem... They grow these discrete tools to a large number, it increases the UI complexity, inevitably resulting in tons of stuff hidden under context menus and usually heavily resorting to mode based interfaces.
I had hoped this concept would become popular so that things like Photoshop and Illustrator could be simplified.
Something like the Flash pen tool is much simpler, but still absolutely requires you to maintain some state: clicking versus click-dragging, remembering not to close a shape by simply clicking on a control point without also dragging out Bezier points. There are expectations before you can begin to flow with the thing.
I've been working hard on this concept using a Minecraft mod (Snowball Madness: http://www.airwindows.com/snowball-madness/ ) that suffered the same problem. I'd made countless 'effects' so it was nearly impossible to remember what did what.
After a drastic functionality-culling process, I began rebuilding things in line with a concept: generalizing. If you can place a block above a snowball and it places the block where the snowball hits, that's what it does, no exceptions. TNT used to spawn explosions just for silly fun, but it became 'place TNT block' altering the type of silliness. Pickaxes used to dig large holes in rock (in some cases, leaving ores hanging) so all the other tools got similar treatments: axes vanishing wood logs, shovels vanishing dirt, hoes turning grass/dirt into tilled farmland. Always trying to incorporate 'cheaty' ways of doing things but predictably so.
It's like the old Apple UI guidelines. The default expectation is that you can grope blindly towards a result and things do what you think they would do, allowing you to not think about the process.
I suppose musicians are more comfortable with a visual metaphor. Still the over-the-top skeuomorphism doesn't seem that efficient to me compared to just coding it.
In a DAW, as you're playing the track, you crank the reverb knob until you hit the sweet spot.
In a music programming language you fiddle with values and re-compile repeatedly until you find the sweet spot, but even then it's hard to find because you can't remember if it's better this time you compiled or last time.
For musical coding to work, I think it needs a Bret Victor / Swift Playgrounds / Lighttable style IDE, and then... it starts to look a lot like a DAW, just with algorithms instead of a note grid or timeline.
That said, a lot of plugins and virtual instruments never left that world of design after most others moved on.
Depending on the market segment you're after that might be OK though.
Could you explain with an example?
I think what you're saying may be technically true, but not necessarily what most users want.
I'm most familiar with photo editing and retouching, and while the software can appear daunting, it all makes sense looking at it as a photographer and using it for a little while. I use both Capture One and DxO Optics for RAW processing and retouching, and I often read the forums forums for both, and I don't recall ever seeing complaints that there are too many options and tools.
(shameless plug) I've tried taking the approach of making a plugin for existing tools (Sketch, Sketchup, Photoshop, etc.) to make accessing the large set of tools easier via touch gestures at https://thimblemac.com . It also tracks most-recently-used tools.
Pure Data's domain is digital signal processing, with an emphasis on sound. It's good for prototyping because one edits the signal graph, GUI, and event-triggered scripts in the same visual window using the same event loop.
So in a way it's good for building idiosyncratic little "musical hex editors": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rz1uNLHorEs
I say idiosyncratic because when you can connect anything to anything else, weird things start to happen. (For example, adding two more boxes to the diagram to control the crossfader with the pitch of someone's voice.)
well there's Renoise ( http://renoise.com ), which is IMHO, amazing.
it's just that, it's based on the old-school trackers paradigm (like Fast Tracker, Impulse Tracker, etc), which not everybody likes (but is actually a great fit for cutting up breakbeats and stuff that fit step-sequencer like workflows). Enhanced with support for VSTs, LADSPA etc (and built-in effects of course) and a sampler interface to design instruments that kinda blows the socks off just about anything.
so there's that. and I love it :)
but I do agree there's a big hole for a DAW with a good piano-roll and "stretchy" timelines like the arrangement view in Ableton. especially the way you can navigate the timeline by dragging on it left and right, but dragging up and down to zoom, such an intuitive way to navigate in sonic material where you often want to be able to zoom from hawks-eye overview to dive straight down and adjust some detail in the 10s of milliseconds, and back. I don't get why nobody has copied this way of navigation, it's IMHO right up there with ableton's timestretch/markers features that make it great. Yes Bitwig copied it, but that's partially Ableton's team.
Bitwig is crossplatform, btw. But I never could get it do what I wanted. But I had a sort of temporary/educational license which expired and wowww was that program ever completely useless in demo-version.
Speaking of that, it's the main reason why I started using Renoise. It was the only program that was even remotely useful in demo-version (just disabled export-to-wav and render-to-sample, inconvenient, but doesn't make the program useless, you can always record your sound in another way). Of course I got it licensed by now, having had way too much fun with it. It's only like 85 euros (including tax), compare to what you pay for Ableton nowadays, which doesn't even run on Linux.
Oh and we all know there's no "best" DAW, right? No shame in using multiple tools, each for which is best at what it does, and just bounce the audio through your OS audio framework (there's equivalents for JACK on Windows and Mac, right?)
I mean, basically all DAWs have a grid view where you can see notes on a grid and zoom in and out on that grid. If you zoom out to 1/16 notes, that's basically a step sequencer view... but then you can zoom in when you want to add 1/32 or 1/64 note complexity.
How much can you simplify the interface and still make it do everything producers want to do? Garageband simplified the interface quite a bit compared to Logic, but even that can get complicated and ultimately isn't as flexible as other DAWs.
I've been a fairly loyal user of Sonar and FL Studio for over a decade, largely out of habit because that's what I used when I first started and don't care to learn anything different. Especially with FL Studio, early versions of that were extremely simple. At it's core, it's still fairly simple, but allows you a lot of flexibility to do crazy things through automation.
Especially in EDM, the DAW has essentially become another instrument for creativity, so limiting that will limit the audience to those with lesser needs. I do think there is a big hole for a cross-platform DAW that's at least halfway decent, so this is exciting to see!