Yes, it’s pretty unforgiving. Low latency and live performances leave no wiggle room - software must be low latency and highly reliable. You can’t afford to drop one in 10000 buffers.

Real-time audio is a concern of the operation system and drivers primarily.

nonsense. you have to be very careful in designing audio software. the entire soundchain has to compute within the buffer window or you WILL get bad stuttering output. you can choose slow responsivesness or extreme optimization, and for real time performance only optimization works.

Additionally there are lookahead options in some effects that requires some delay, and clock sync for midi devices

This isn't mutual exclusive to my statement, so, please don't be so offensive and call it nonsense.

There are already clones like https://github.com/storytold/soundcraft out there. No idea if they're any good, but they do exist.

I spent some time with Soundcraft. It is no way a clone, or even a blurry reflection of any of the leading DAWs like Ableton, FL Studio, Logic, etc. It has some passing resemblance to Reaper, but Soundcraft isn't even close in usability and cohesiveness.

I have heard people claim that ArtCraft are not using LLMs to generate their apps, but the presentation and code almost seem like someone gave their LLM agent the Reaper manual and asked it to produce a clone.

Their main tagline on the site is also strange "Professional audio recording and mixing, rebuilt in pure Rust." Really, who cares? No one I know in the performance, composition and recording industry cares at all. What they care about is reliability, stability, workflows and support. Yes, and price. But none of the flagship DAWs have onerous pricing and as others have pointed out, FL Studio has been a good investment over the years. If price is a concern, it is hard to beat Reaper in terms of value and functionality.

I am sure people will continue to one-shot or iterate clones of the leading DAWs and some people will try to use them and probably end up wasting their time on their productions when whoever is behind the project moves on. It is extremely hard work supporting any application and the users of MIDI, audio and notation software are extremely demanding.

My career started way back working on apps for companies like Passport, Opcode and some other music startups, and it I had the sufficient time, the last thing I would want to do is just clone Ableton. My hope is that some effort will come along to total re-invent what and how a music creation and production app should be. I often times feel we hit "Peak DAW" over 20 years ago.

I'm not so sure. I've been building a live iPad based mixer for my modular the last couple of weeks. I've been a heavy user of Live and other audio apps for years and it's been pretty trivial to put together. Been running it with tons of simultaneous tracks, effects, and complex DSP with latency compensation interfacing with my 10 in 8 out interface and haven't had a glitch the entire time.

There are many kinds of Real Time Audio.

If you just do "computer music", with no synced live instruments and external synths, it's a much easier problem, 40 ms of latency is perfectly fine, and on modern hardware it's not hard to hit that target.

Soundcraft isn't it, but check out Morningdaw. The rate at which its evolved suggests it's very much LLM-made.