DAWproject file exchange standard

[Starship Krupa]

https://www.bitwig.com/stories/bitwig-and-presonus-are-making-it-easy-to-share-projects-between-programs-271

Free and open standard.

This would be an excellent feature to include in Cakewalk Sonar.

[mettelus]

True, but that would also require competitors to play nice in the sandbox. You do not see that very often anywhere in life.

[Glenn Stanton]

14 hours ago, Starship Krupa said:

Free and open standard.

which one? there are so many. several are evolutions of existing ones, and some are simply not workable for professionals so they don't gain traction... in general, to be meaningful, the parity of features across DAW would need to be strongly aligned, and features, missing plugins, etc would need to be handled gracefully, and then of course there are the audio / video / midi / api & content specs that must be supported... 

imagine a 50 track project with 20 (from 10 vendors) plugins, 10 VI from 5 vendors w/ program switching, audio, MIDI, and a short video, plus copious notes in tracks, plugins, and project level, with heavy dependency on "chord tracks" "arranger tracks" "automation envelopes".

heck, most DAW struggle to manage that 100% internally, now imagine how that could be successfully shared across 4-5 DAW vendor products... basically you'd have to dumb down the lowest common denominator - audio and midi only, plugin metadata only, etc so no dependency on actual plugins and VI, and all in XML and/or JSON.

to wit: MusicXML 😉 

[Magic Russ]

20 hours ago, mettelus said:

True, but that would also require competitors to play nice in the sandbox. You do not see that very often anywhere in life.

MIDI

[Starship Krupa]

21 hours ago, mettelus said:

that would also require competitors to play nice in the sandbox

Right, as with MIDI, VST, ARA, .SFZ and ASIO. Standards like these, once they get enough traction, result in greater revenue for those who buy in.

So you like to track and edit in REAPER or Studio One, but you prefer to mix in Sonar or Mixbus? Great, the easier it is to do that, the more likely that both companies will get your licensing money.

Your client's home studio is based around Waveform, but you work in Cubase? Great, they can do the initial tracking and/or composing in Waveform, then you can import their work into Cubase for mixing and further editing. Maybe your client can't afford a copy of Omnisphere, so they write the track using XPand! and let you pick some groovy sounds using Omnisphere.

To the extent that being able to do this is important to you, presence or lack of this feature will influence purchasing decisions.

6 hours ago, Glenn Stanton said:

the parity of features across DAW would need to be strongly aligned, and features, missing plugins, etc would need to be handled gracefully....

Of course it won't be able to cover every single parameter. As with all interchange formats, there will be features that aren't/can't be included. For instance, at present, video is a no-go between Bitwig and Studio One.

As with loading a project in any DAW, it pops a notification if it can't find a plug-in.

It's not meant to be able to go back and forth all day long between dissimilar DAW's during a complex mixing process, but to be a way that a certain amount of pertinent information can be exported from one DAW and imported to another. At as early a stage as possible.

I'd say that it could probably cover most things that are involved in a rough mix, so you do your tracking and comping in your favorite tracking and comping DAW and then export it for mixing in your favorite mixing DAW. People do this today by bouncing to individual audio files in the first DAW, then importing them into the second one. "Imagine" doing that for 50 tracks, at the end of which every effect you used, every edit (no matter how imperfect) and every MIDI track, is baked-in and can't be unbaked without going back to the first DAW.

I'm not going to bother typing it all out for people who don't follow links, but here's an in-depth list of what it does (and does not) cover at present:

https://www.bitwig.com/support/technical_support/dawproject-file-format-faqs-62/

[Mark Morgon-Shaw]

14 hours ago, Starship Krupa said:

So you do your tracking and comping in your favorite tracking and comping DAW and then export it for mixing in your favorite mixing DAW. People do this today by bouncing to individual audio files in the first DAW, then importing them into the second one. "Imagine" doing that for 50 tracks, at the end of which every effect you used, every edit (no matter how imperfect) and every MIDI track, is baked-in and can't be unbaked without going back to the first DAW.

I have to collaborate with mutlple musicians for some of my production music tracks and everyone I know in the industry just sends each other Wav files as it's so much simpler. One guy I work with regularly has CbB and honestly I don't even want his project files because how he works and lays everything out is very diffrent to how I work. His projects look like a unicorn vomited on the screen whereas mine are very simple and grey. I use folders, he does not. I use multiple busses - he does not. Even the way people name their tracks differs.

So it's not really an issue to bounce a bunch of  track-outs and everyone who does it regular enough knows the drill. Print any FX that are an integral part of the sound and leave the rest to the person doing the final mix/master. Most of us use Dropbox to send wav files to each other.

I think that's as univeral as it gets. 

Edited September 28, 2023 by Mark Morgon-Shaw

[Starship Krupa]

8 hours ago, Mark Morgon-Shaw said:

everyone I know in the industry just sends each other Wav files

Yes, that's usually how it's done now.

If this thing actually works and gains acceptance, then there will be another option. It's nice to have options, whether one uses them regularly or not. I'm not someone who at this point needs to move projects from one DAW to the next, but if I can ever get my head around Ableton Live, that may change.

This, to me, seems like something that might be more popular for the use case I suggested: track/edit/compose in one program, then export it to another, for use in one's own studio. Or more casual collaborations, rough demos between bandmates, etc. Starting a piece in a program whose strengths are in composition and moving it to one whose strengths are mixing.

As you suggest, not something I'd foresee getting much uptake in the "industry." After all, industry favorite Pro Tools is usually last to get features like this, if it ever does. And Apple, makers of Logic Pro, treat interoperability like vampires do holy water.

[Mark Morgon-Shaw]

48 minutes ago, Starship Krupa said:

seems like something that might be more popular for the use case I suggested: track/edit/compose in one program, then export it to another, for use in one's own studio.

That methodology has always struck me as a bit of a strange way of going about  things. Surely more efficient to learn onw DAW really well and just roll with it ?   

[Starship Krupa]

5 hours ago, Mark Morgon-Shaw said:

That methodology has always struck me as a bit of a strange way of going about  things. Surely more efficient to learn onw DAW really well and just roll with it ?   

That's been the way that I do it too, but I've been hearing from more and more people whose projects involve more than one DAW. Track in one, master in another. Compose in one, mix in another.

The Gibson/Cakewalk Inc. debacle taught me to always stay versed in at least two DAW's, 'cause you never know what's going to happen.

And while it's true that you can do just about anything with any DAW if you try hard enough, some parts of the process just work better on some than others. There's at least one DAW whose primary focus is mixing: Mixbus. And if you're doing loop-based EDM, the compositional tools in the DAW's that started with that workflow might be the best. Bitwig, FL Studio, Ableton Live. But maybe they aren't the mixing and routing powerhouse that Cakewalk is.

When I first tried Cakewalk, I had a project I was in the middle of in Mixcraft and decided to export the raw audio as I had it and import it into Cakewalk as a test of workflow, stability, etc. After spending an hour with Console View, I never wanted to mix with anything else. Setting up my routing and effects and everything took so much less time.

With Mixcraft, tracking and comping is much simpler. The tools for comping might not be as powerful, but it has a straightforward workflow that gets out of your way. It's still too easy to mess things up in Cakewalk. Unintended consequences. Still, I do it in Cakewalk because it's simpler to just use the one program. But I do understand why someone might want to work that way.

Anyway, DAWproject is for people who want to do it the other way. I don't know how much I'd use it, but I still think it would be a good feature to have in Cakewalk Sonar. It would help signal that Cakewalk wants to keep with the times, to take its place in the arena. Cakewalk has a long history of playing well with 3rd-party technologies, VST, ReWire, ARA, etc. It also, unfortunately, has a dark moment in its history when its entire userbase needed to figure out how to move on. SONAR was saved from oblivion, but that wasn't a given.

Edited September 29, 2023 by Starship Krupa

[Glenn Stanton]

9 hours ago, Starship Krupa said:

The Gibson/Cakewalk Inc. debacle taught me to always stay versed in at least two DAW's, 'cause you never know what's going to happen.

now i'm feeling like i must be paranoid with 6 DAW applications... 🙂 

really though it's because some clients will only share their project file and related content and do not want to do old school export to WAV and let the mix guy do things... but for me, that's maybe 3 in 10. most will simply export their tracks (WAV or AIFF) and a sample mix or two, maybe some notes on "critical" effects they want.

Edited September 29, 2023 by Glenn Stanton
grammar

[Starship Krupa]

7 hours ago, Glenn Stanton said:

some clients will only share their project file and related content and do not want to do old school export to WAV and let the mix guy do things...

Use case! 😄

That's the kind of scenario I think it's built for: things that start out in one DAW and just need to go to another DAW. Wouldn't you just love to see a new feature that coddles the desires of lazy clients? 😄

We'll see whether the format goes anywhere. Bitwig have managed to get some uptake on the CLAP plug-in format, which IMO is a solution that's still waiting for a problem. This actually (potentially) brings something to the table.

[Heath Row]

On 9/27/2023 at 9:23 AM, Starship Krupa said:

This would be an excellent feature to include in Cakewalk Sonar.

Reading between the lines in this post by the big guy, I'd say it ain't going to happen, but who knows . . .

 

[Glenn Stanton]

23 hours ago, Starship Krupa said:

Use case! 😄

That's the kind of scenario I think it's built for: things that start out in one DAW and just need to go to another DAW. Wouldn't you just love to see a new feature that coddles the desires of lazy clients? 😄

in my case(s) - clients want the work done in the DAW their project is in 🙂 so having several of the popular ones is the investment i made to ensure i can address those. but if there was a universal DAW project content solution, i would like to be able to import it cleanly, use just the one DAW and export it reliably into whatever format the client wanted. 🧚‍♀️

[Starship Krupa]

10 hours ago, heath row said:

Reading between the lines in this post by the big guy, I'd say it ain't going to happen, but who knows . . .

 

It depends.

The message could be "we're going to have a complete solution for people who want to start in easy mode and move to a mixing powerhouse, so this would be superfluous" or it could be "this is an idea whose time has come, and as a matter of fact, we've already set it up in our own products."

Project transfer from a starter DAW to the same company's top-of-the-line DAW has been around for many years with Garage Band and Logic.

What hasn't been so easy is transfer between DAW's from two different companies. There have been project interchange formats introduced in decades past, and Cakewalk supports one of them.

[azslow3]

So, one indirect way converting CbB -> DAWProject already exist. First convert to REAPER (with ReaCWP), then convert to DAWproject (with ProjectConverter)

Till DAW developers put real effort to do this right (automatically or after asking user rendering/converting unsupported by export format parts of the project, like it is done for "Audio export" or saving into common formats from graphic editors), exporting to different DAW, changing there and exporting back is not going to be fluent. So one direction transfer is probably primary application for any export format in the DAWs world.

[Glenn Stanton]

8 hours ago, azslow3 said:

So, one indirect way converting CbB -> DAWProject already exist. First convert to REAPER (with ReaCWP), then convert to DAWproject (with ProjectConverter)

Till DAW developers put real effort to do this right (automatically or after asking user rendering/converting unsupported by export format parts of the project, like it is done for "Audio export" or saving into common formats from graphic editors), exporting to different DAW, changing there and exporting back is not going to be fluent. So one direction transfer is probably primary application for any export format in the DAWs world.

agreed. realistically, generally the object model is project -> tracks + envelopes -> clips + envelopes -> busses + envelopes -- each with settings, effects w/ settings, plus all the written notes, and then the associated audio and/or MIDI files in formats that are generally well known by now.

one inhibitor would be the envelopes data if not smoothed could be significantly sized. otherwise, most of the metadata would be fairly minimal (say <10mb uncompressed?) 

[Bapu]

Any Studio One 6.5.x users encounter this problem with a DAWproject export?

I did the export, opened the export zip in Bitwig 5.0.11. After the first few seconds of playback things started to get out of sync.

Facts about the project:

1. the tracks were consolidated, no split clips

2. It's 73bpm in 4/4 (with 2 breakdowns in 2/4 for one measure resuming to 4/4) 

3. The final three measures area step down in tempo from 73bpm to a final 63bpm.

4. It appears all my 3rd party plugins did come across as expected. I only used 3rd party plugs.

After an attempt of removing all plugins and re-exporting, and getting the same results, I decided why not test the export by bringing it back into a new Studio One project. Guess what? Same crappy out of sync happening.

[Starship Krupa]

6 hours ago, Bapu said:

The final three measures area step down in tempo from 73bpm to a final 63bpm.

Just guessing, this is probably where the process is running into trouble. Either that or the switch in time signature.

[Bruno de Souza Lino]

On 9/28/2023 at 6:59 PM, Mark Morgon-Shaw said:

That methodology has always struck me as a bit of a strange way of going about  things. Surely more efficient to learn onw DAW really well and just roll with it ?   

Not everyone wants to learn or maintain a ProTools centric workflow. Or has the money to do so.

[Bapu]

15 hours ago, Starship Krupa said:

Just guessing, this is probably where the process is running into trouble. Either that or the switch in time signature.

yup.

I just did a DAWproject export of a song that is the same time sig and tempo throughout the entire project and it was opened and played like a dream in Bitwig.

[EDIT] Except all 3 instances of UAD Distressor were tagged as not loaded. Well that's a Bitwig issue. It seems it knows my SPARK location but ignores my full on UAD location.

 

Edited October 29, 2023 by Bapu