I don’t like commercial software. I hate its price. I don’t like being confined to one operating system.
I’m never satisfied with computer music software I use, so, for the hell of it, here’s most of the features a perfect DAW should have, in my opinion.

  • Free (as in price).
    As I said before, I hate it when I like a program, but it’s commercial, and since I can’t pay for anything, I can’t use it. Plus, software typically costs a lot, and I don’t have the budget of a studio. So, this is an idiot’s dream, but my perfect DAW would be free. Besides, everyone likes freebies, not only me.
  • Free (as in usage).
    Since I was once crazed about using only open-source software on my Windows computer, and still am (but not to such a degree), I won’t go into much detail on this one, except noting that open source would aid further development and expanding of the project greatly.
  • Cross-platform.
    In the world of computer music, Linux users are almost always ignored, and while the Mac platform is prominent – if not dominant – in professional studios, audio software doesn’t always support it either. This especially applies to Linux, since it’s free (as in cost). Also, since it would be open-source, users of countless other operating systems could’ve port it to their countless Unix derivatives.
  • Support for [the] many important formats and standards.
    VST, RTAS, Audio Units, LADSPA, LV2, Ogg, MP3, FLAC, AIFF, OpenSound Control, you name it. Of course, there would be problems, such as with ReWire and REX, licensing of whom requires a valid company ownership, but as of writing this post, I don’t really care about that.
  • Good-looking.
    Enough said.
  • Different and interchangeable MIDI editors.
    Sometimes, when I visit Renoise forums, I notice messages along the lines of “thank you, Renoise, you prevented me from being confined to the note roll editor for the rest of my life!” (“note roll editor” as in the MIDI clip editors in Reason, Cubase, Tracktion, etcetera). Why, I’m sure that if Renoise was more widely used, people on the forums dedicated to a specific note roll editor would post things like “thank you, [insert note roll editor here], you prevented me from being confined to a tracker-style note arranger for the rest of my life!”.
    This is a feature I’d want the most: being able to switch between MIDI editors in radically different styles. For example, one could switch between a note roll editor (Reason, Cubase[...]), a tracker-style interface (Renoise, MadTracker, “old school” trackers[...]), and a drum programmer in the style of TR-808, TR-909 and ReDrum, that would trigger selected MIDI notes. This would increase the flexibility and versatility of the software, and reduce the moans from people that don’t like a specific type of note arranging.

Here’s my stupid vision of the perfect way of making music on the computer. Laugh away and blame me for being a communist, not a Linux user, broke, and whatever else that comes to your mind.