Please consider supporting multi touch, where it makes sense

We absolutely do already :D

https://gs-dsp.com/

Big fan of your interfaces here, and MMM is an amazing utility - thanks.

Thank you so much! More stuff coming all the time :)

I've got a Steam Deck and I've been curious about using that as a music composition tool. The controls offer some interesting possibilities as performance inputs.

The problem is that all Windows or Linux music apps tend to presume a large monitor and a mouse and keyboard. I've not found anything terribly usable.

Can steam deck run any Linux application? You might have fun designing creative abstractions in Pure Data meant to fit in the UI. Then, if you can hook it up to a keyboard, you might be able to take advantage of the user inputs on the steam deck & keyboard to make an ersatz OP-1.

> Can steam deck run any Linux application?

Yes. It's amd64, so you probably don't even need to compile it, either.

On top of that, it's basically just Arch linux with a complicated filesystem scheme. Flatpaks are the recommended distribution mechanism, but you can do whatever you want. It comes with KDE and an X server out of the box.

That's a really interesting idea! With the dual trackpads plus all standard controller inputs and the paddles on the back, the Deck is really uniquely positioned here.

You could try plugging in a monitor via HDMI. If you don't have a dock (the JSAUX one is cheap and gets great reviews, but I personally have the official one) you can get a pretty cheap USBC to HDMI cable nearly anywhere. I found some in stock at a random walmart on a road trip. Was able to plug the deck into our van's built-in entertainment system (it still blows my mind that there are now vehicles with TV screens built in).

If you do end up doing it, I'd love to see a video/blog post/whatever about it

I got the JSAUX dock while waiting for Valve to release the official dock. Never bought the official on release, the Gen 2 JSAUX with the extra USBs is awesome. Docked my deck to my TV and its both a media player as well as my console, almost never remove it except to dust :D. Also, the USB has recognized all peripherals I've thrown at it (I use desktop mode 98% of the time) and the ethernet works as expected.

Nice! I've been amazed at what a great console it is. I love docking it and hooking up controllers and doing local co-op with my kids. Some of the best times we've had as a family in the last 6 months were playing Shredder's Revenge with the deck docked to the TV. that game and many others work wonderfully with these cheap XBox 360 controllers: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B09WQGQ6D2/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b...

Bitwig and LMMS work in the Steam Deck although touch mode in bitwig is indeed a bit odd due to monitor size assumption.

If only we had taken the issue of accessibility seriously 30 years ago, and realise that it isn't about pesky blind people wanting to participate in the society, but actually about being able to run software with different interfaces seamlessly, this problem wouldn't even exist today ...

UI is hard and subtle and a touch interface for sighted people might be radically different from a touch interface for people with impaired vision.

I love Cubasis, but it definitely has some frustrating bugs. The team is pretty responsive, but I'd be quite interested to see if Logic is any better.

Logic has been the most intuitive DAW I've used, with Ableton up there but way too busy visually.

Cubase/Cubasis has always been riddled with bugs. It was my DAW for two different stints and I loved a lot about it but had to abandon because it wasn't reliable.

I absolutely love Ableton for all my electronic work. Whenever I am composing with virtual instruments (Kontakt, etc) though, Cubase just works better for me (even though it is a beast).

Big fan of Ableton for my own electronic music jamming too.

Yep it's great overall but sometimes very confusing.

I was a long time Cubasis user but had to ditch when the latest one was released so buggy and with a load of usability regressions that are still not fixed. I bought it on launch day and found about 15 showstopper bugs in the first half hour of trying to use it. At that point they'd lost me as a customer forever more and I switched to NanoStudio 2 which, in terms of touch interface design, is a work of art. Plus it never, ever crashes.

The lack of AU on Windows, and the lack of VST on any mobile device, is done more to hold back DAW than anything else.

Most plug-ins are available as multiple formats though. Is it really that much of a friction point?

Pro Tools has seen huge success despite being the only major user of RTAS/AAX for example.

The part where they're not available on mobile? Incredibly so.

The fact that there's no AU on Windows? Less so.

Yeah on the apple its Au only but with the clap plugin format its open source so it may be possible to have clap plugins in an android daw, but on ios its au only and I doubt that will change.

I recently did a gig with a quad cortex and honestly I couldn't shake the feeling of just wishing I could have all my Plugins (FabFilter, SoundToys, NAM and NeuralDSP mostly) instead. iPad, good interface, some bluetooth switch/expression pedal and all the same plugins I have at home would be amazing for me.

Just curious if anyone knows. Suppose a band of the future is just a few players who show up with iPads (guitar, bass, key/synth, drums) and, where relevant, a control surface (midi controller, edrums, etc). Does Logic have a "federated" mode? Can each iPad synchronize to a shared click track or other backing tracks for lights, etc or does the "brain" of a performance still need to be centralized?

Edit: I'm wondering if that "federated" functionality could be used to reduce the amount of gear required for a band using IEMs. That would be a _killer_ use case.

I'm super excited about this though and really looking forward to a major step forward at least in the guitar world.

While Logic doesn't feature this yet, the closest analog I know of is the Ableton Link protocol which allows users on a network to synchronize their master clock with other users across any app that supports it (Ableton, Pro Tools, Korg sequencers, etc).

While simple and meant more of a collaborative feature, this is a tremendously helpful feature that allows people to jump right in to a music-making session and ensure that their rig is going to be synced up with others in a musical meaningful way.

How does this handle latency of data transfer? I have worked with professional musicians and the delay of even 10ms across the stage annoys them.

I am trying to envision how syncing DAW's through the network could possibly avoid what easily amounts to more than 20ms of delay back and forth between devices.

Is this just not an issue for digital music production? It's a massive issue for live music and in-ear-monitors on stage.

Ableton Link only synchronizes the clock, transport, and BPM. No data.

It measures and accounts for latency between devices.

Well that’s frigging cool! Thanks for enlightening me!

I'm not claiming that it uses NTP, but:

> NTP can usually maintain time to within tens of milliseconds over the public Internet, and can achieve better than one millisecond accuracy in local area networks under ideal conditions

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Time_Protocol#Clock_sy...

The algorithm is more sensitive to variance than latency, but over a LAN variance is usually pretty okay. Wifi can be a lot worse, though, especially if there are a lot of clients.

Well that’s cool, I definitely have some reading for today after the work day is over!

Thank you kindly!

Yes, latencies of 10 ms are noticeable for musicians. I feel like I can feel everything over 5-ish.

A fun fact is that that's why a symphony needs a conductor: one corner of the symphony to the other is 17-ish meters, which is 50 ms of latency. They have to lock in to a visual queue because at those distances, you can't synchronize on sound. It's also interesting to note that a symphony very literally sounds different on one side than the other, and not just in relative prominence: at march tempo (120 BPM), if you're sitting on one side of the symphony, some instruments may be a 32nd note ahead of the ones on the other side by the time they reach your ears.

This is a multi-studio live collaboration project which had a MIDI sync over the internet.

Amazing to see affordable connection speeds have risen to the point where this is possible.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FE1sY4OY1D4

Latency is the issue, not bandwidth, and the internet isn't fast enough for live instruments across it (unless the performers happen to be on the same local uplink). Even me pinging Google is 23 ms, where as most actual home users will be 50-200 ms from me.

Latency on a home fibre will be significantly lower than a 56k dial-up connection.

Somehow the artists could collaborate remotely using a shared MIDI clock. Admittedly it was techno which is both loopy and predictable, but still a cool achievement nonetheless.

I have home fiber. Again, I have 20 ms to Google. 40 ms is already in the range that playing traditional instruments in sync is basically impossible. At a more typical 100 ms between nodes, that's a full 16th note of lag at common tempos.

I know people that have also done it with techno, but they consider the lag as part of their unique sound. It's not something you can do with music in a general purpose sense.

For live performances you can do a lot of this stuff with AUM. It’s awesome for chaining plug-ins in novel ways. Has midi support as well. It’s the main way I use plugins on iPad.

The “federated” option you’re talking about sounds like it’s regular MIDI Sync with transport control. You hit play, everything plays in sync. Logic already supports this, you just have to wire things together.

Semi off topic but if I want to develop audio plugins for live performance iOS/osx what is a really good resource, in your estimation?

When I look for books on Core Audio there’s approximately one on Amazon and it isn’t very recent.

I don’t really want to live on another layer, like developing in Max or Juce or AudioKit or whatever is out there.

I’d rather code directly against Apple’s APIs. Or I think that’s what I want. Maybe I’m misguided.

Do you have any suggestions?

We develop on JUCE and I really would suggest anyone just getting into this should too or maybe iPlug2. Handling all the quirks of different formats and DAWs is an enormous time sink. Do you want to do that or do you want to spend time developing your idea for an effect or instrument?

You don’t need to use the GUI stuff from JUCE so if you have a preferred framework use that instead. We use none of their DSP. We concentrate on developing our own DSP algorithms and making them best in class.

A second vote for JUCE - but also don't forget to add TRACKTION to your framework shopping list. It sits on top of JUCE. The basics are: JUCE for audio i/o and cross-platform plugin coding, TRACKTION on top of JUCE for DAW-like features.

Any opinions on getting Faust involved while we are at it then?

I just completed an article on how to build your first plugin using Javascript through Elementary Audio Framework.

The article contains a Repo that should make it easier to build. Would really appreciate your feedback.

https://www.chrisjmendez.com/2023/03/29/build-vst-or-audio-u...

It's an interesting consideration how frustrating and dangerous non-tactile interfaces can be in cars, and how versatile they can be when you can give them your full attention.

I had always assumed pro-level DAW users would want lots of knobs and sliders to change as many parameters of the sound as easily and quickly as possible.

Do you have any insight on why bigger companies like Arturia don’t bring more of their VSTs and plugins to iOS?

I’m a hobbyist music maker and I vastly prefer AUM on my iPad to working in GarageBand (logic is far beyond my needs). I just want more of the desktop plugin ecosystem to trickle down.

I can only guess but it can be a daunting prospect to get things portable. Could be their DAW abstraction or their graphics framework that causes them massive work. And let’s get real here. It’s not exactly a lucrative market. We charge much less on iOS than we do on desktop for several reasons (among them no method for resale). Yet when we launched on iOS people were shocked at our high prices (we’re not making yet another compressor or 3 band eq we’re doing complicated original stuff at the highest audio quality). We are just two people and want to make a modest income. (We would earn way way more in typical software jobs). So yeah I suspect it’s just not worth it to these larger companies. Especially with the Apple cut.

Fellow audio developer here. Yes, the iOS market is rubbish. I spoke to some DAW companies, and they all said they sell their iOS apps at a loss - they don't cover the costs of developing them. It only makes sense when you think of iOS apps as a promotion to sell their desktop counterparts.

Which is a shame because I think the iPhone is a beautiful device for musicians. A fantastic microphone, right in your pocket.

I kind of knew the answer when I posted the question. It's also hard to properly price something like an audio plugin, right? Niche customer base, poor customer base (musicians)… the people making money, audio engineers and such, want to work on the "best" hardware for their job, which basically means a traditional computer.

I do believe that using a modern touchscreen interface to creative software unlocks more potential than simply using a keyboard and mouse. Touching interfaces to control sound just seems like it would hold a lot more creative potential energy to me.

If so, then what would really be revolutionary would be adding touchscreen to Macs.

Chicken and egg problem. Hardly worth porting plugins if there is no decent DAW ecosystem beyond a watered-down Cubase version ..

The desktop plugin ecosystem will come to iOS now that Logic Pro is on iOS. I'm seeing tons and tons of plugin developers jumping on the AUv3 bandwagon that is now on the road ..

Glad to hear it. I think maybe it's generational too. Watching the promotional video for Logic Pro on iOS and nobody featured on it is over 40, maybe even over 30.