I think the deeper process here is this: if you're a musician and you start using a DAW, pretty soon you'll be an engineer, whether you intended to be or not.
In the days before DAWs, the role of musician and engineer were both critical for recorded music, but also mostly distinct. DAWs have changed that fundamentally because there's very little capital outlay required for the engineer's tools these days.
We've seen this over the years in Ardour. A musician wants a big red button and an application that will find their device signal all by itself. Two weeks later they want to use an EQ. Two months later they want to be to arrange whole sections. Two years later, and they don't like the pan power law and have some criticisms of the automation interpolation.
> I think the deeper process here is this: if you're a musician and you start using a DAW, pretty soon you'll be an engineer, whether you intended to be or not.
There's a bunch of stuff like that happening in that industry as the equipment evolves. I've been doing software/networking/hardware for coming up on 30 years now. My wife's been doing mostly live audio/production with some recording for about the same amount of time. Starting about 10 years ago she had to start learning about networking. It started simple with things like setting up routers/WiFi access points for controlling consoles with iPads. Now with AES-67 she's had to learn a whole bunch about RTP, PTP, QoS, VLANs, DHCP, subnetting, etc. It's working out well for her, she's incredibly sharp and many of her peers come to her for advice/consultation when things aren't working right, but it was definitely not something she expected to need to learn. When everyone's stumped they give me a call... I don't know much at all about the audio side of it but a little bit of Wireshark can usually explain what's broken in their systems.
In the days before DAWs, the role of musician and engineer were both critical for recorded music, but also mostly distinct. DAWs have changed that fundamentally because there's very little capital outlay required for the engineer's tools these days.
We've seen this over the years in Ardour. A musician wants a big red button and an application that will find their device signal all by itself. Two weeks later they want to use an EQ. Two months later they want to be to arrange whole sections. Two years later, and they don't like the pan power law and have some criticisms of the automation interpolation.