Its weird to see the impressions of someone who has apparently never used the equipment used in music production trying to talk intelligently about said devices. So many incorrect assumptions its really painful to read as someone aquainted with audio engineering. Interesting window into how the devs see it nonetheless.
Huh? The author wasn’t talking about audio engineering, so I don’t see how that is relevant. The GUI programming issues they’re discussing would be true for any realtime application. The fact they are building a DAW is a bit beside the point otherwise.
I find the article actually refreshingly dry. The author acknowledges and breaks down a large series of interface requirements for a music production tool and approaches it from a pure development point of view.
I wonder what are the "many incorrect assumptions" you see. I didn't notice any attempt to judge or discredit any of the requirements, he merely described them in a very sober way.
For someone very familiar with audio equipment it was a nice read for me. It's like reading a summary of user expectations to switches and knobs in a car, from a pure GUI development point of view.
the comments about the layout of “mixing tracks” not following design guidelines or being a standard list/tree/etc struck me.
in traditional audio engineering we call them channel strips and their layout reflects the signal flow - eq knobs are typically at the top, followed by compression, fx, and so on.
I think he meant that they don’t follow typical design guidelines for graphical user interfaces on a computer. Which they don’t — outside DAWs (and maybe some image editors?), I’ve never seen a GUI arranged like a channel strip, where controls are stacked on top of each other but not necessarily arranged in a perfect grid. A set of controls like e.g. [0] in Ableton is highly non-standard, compared to the kinds of layouts most GUI toolkits provide.
I'm sure there's a clever term for it, but a lot of developers (and this is probably a timeless thing) think they can dive into any industry and make a difference, or see things from a different point of view and therefore better.
I mean it has a basis in reality, loads of people here will have joined companies that were years behind, companies in new industries. Myself I've gone from cable TV to investment banking to public transit to B2B e-commerce to telcoms to the energy industry, but nowhere did I assume to think I knew better. Not when it came to their main industry anyway, software development and practices, sure, that's kind of my jam.
When it comes down to it, every job is just data in, data out, localization and date / number formatting. And trying to get my colleagues to not overcomplicate things, like come on, it's just a simple list view, if you're bored by that you're on the wrong assignment.
