Universal Audio Luna.

octatonic

This is an interesting move.

https://www.pro-tools-expert.com/production-expert-1/2020/1/16/universal-audio-announce-their-new-luna-recording-system

Free DAW for Arrow/Apollo owners.
Mac only at this stage.

WiresDreamDisasters

It's not a DAW. It's a recording system

octatonic

Lol.

WiresDreamDisasters

But it does look great. Im waiting on more info. It has some sort of pitch shifting and time stretching. I'm hoping for slip editing, tempo changes, etc. All the usual stuff you'd need to record proggy shit.

digitalscream

So...I thought this was going to be revolutionary. How does this revolutionise anything?

It's a hardware-dependent DAW. We've had one of those for a couple of decades - it's called "Pro Tools"

PolarityMan

So taking out the fact that this is audio for a moment I've got to wonder how successful maintaining a locked in proprietary version of a commodotized function set all for free is going to be from a business standpoint.

I'd be pretty wary of these being abandoned with a few years and even if I had a UA interface I dont think this would move me onto another system. 

PolarityMan

Also have you seen what pro tools is getting as its revolutionary new feature? It will seriously blow your mind. I jsut dont know how they manage to come up with ideas like this, I assume the high price tag allows them to recruit some of the best minds in the industry and funds amazing R&D labs and stuff.

https://www.pro-tools-expert.com/home-page/2020/1/15/avid-pro-tools-2020-to-have-the-most-requested-feature-folder-tracks

digitalscream

PolarityMan said:

Also have you seen what pro tools is getting as its revolutionary new feature? It will seriously blow your mind. I jsut dont know how they manage to come up with ideas like this, I assume the high price tag allows them to recruit some of the best minds in the industry and funds amazing R&D labs and stuff.

https://www.pro-tools-expert.com/home-page/2020/1/15/avid-pro-tools-2020-to-have-the-most-requested-feature-folder-tracks

Woweee.

Pro Tools is getting a feature that Reaper's had for what...10-15 years now?

That's like OS X getting workspaces....

octatonic

digitalscream said:

PolarityMan said:

Also have you seen what pro tools is getting as its revolutionary new feature? It will seriously blow your mind. I jsut dont know how they manage to come up with ideas like this, I assume the high price tag allows them to recruit some of the best minds in the industry and funds amazing R&D labs and stuff.

https://www.pro-tools-expert.com/home-page/2020/1/15/avid-pro-tools-2020-to-have-the-most-requested-feature-folder-tracks

Woweee.

Pro Tools is getting a feature that Reaper's had for what...10-15 years now?

That's like OS X getting workspaces....

I agree AVID have been slow to introduce often requested features but there is a lot of stuff PT has that Reaper doesn't.

octatonic

digitalscream said:

So...I thought this was going to be revolutionary. How does this revolutionise anything?

It's a hardware-dependent DAW. We've had one of those for a couple of decades - it's called "Pro Tools"

The pertinent issue here is "buy-in price".

A base level HDX + PT ultimate + the cheapest HDX capable interface is about £7k- £3k HDX card, 2k for Ultimate and 2k for an Omni.
You also need a machine to put it in (ie not a laptop) or a Thunderbolt expansion chassis which is noisy.

You can buy a UA Arrow for under £500 and get near zero latency recording with plugins (although you probably will spend a lot more on plugins), with none of the "two mixer" thing you need with other DAW's.

That is pretty interesting- even though they are going to have an uphill struggle getting a new DAW established.
Making it free was smart and the only reason it has a chance of working IMHO.

WiresDreamDisasters

digitalscream said:

So...I thought this was going to be revolutionary. How does this revolutionise anything?

It's a hardware-dependent DAW. We've had one of those for a couple of decades - it's called "Pro Tools"

I was only half taking the piss when I said it wasn't a DAW.

Luna will have direct access to the interface. No ASIO or CoreAudio required from what I can tell anyway. No additional buffers to deal with. No driver-induced latency. Everything runs directly on the card saving the need to rely on CPU cycles.

This is a pretty big deal.

spark240

Only on Mac OS ?

octatonic

spark240 said:

Only on Mac OS ?

For now.

digitalscream

WiresDreamDisasters said:

digitalscream said:

So...I thought this was going to be revolutionary. How does this revolutionise anything?

It's a hardware-dependent DAW. We've had one of those for a couple of decades - it's called "Pro Tools"

I was only half taking the piss when I said it wasn't a DAW.

Luna will have direct access to the interface. No ASIO or CoreAudio required from what I can tell anyway. No additional buffers to deal with. No driver-induced latency. Everything runs directly on the card saving the need to rely on CPU cycles.

This is a pretty big deal.

Oh, I understand that. All I see, though, is "When you've moved away from our flavour-of-the-month hardware, you won't be able to do anything with the projects you created in our DAW". Going all-in with this either means you've got plenty of cash to burn, or you're banking on them maintaining the drivers for every new OS version, for as long as you want to be able to use your projects.

From a company that can't even get the base release ready on both operating systems at the same time, that's a big assumption.

octatonic

digitalscream said:

WiresDreamDisasters said:

digitalscream said:

So...I thought this was going to be revolutionary. How does this revolutionise anything?

It's a hardware-dependent DAW. We've had one of those for a couple of decades - it's called "Pro Tools"

I was only half taking the piss when I said it wasn't a DAW.

Luna will have direct access to the interface. No ASIO or CoreAudio required from what I can tell anyway. No additional buffers to deal with. No driver-induced latency. Everything runs directly on the card saving the need to rely on CPU cycles.

This is a pretty big deal.

Oh, I understand that. All I see, though, is "When you've moved away from our flavour-of-the-month hardware, you won't be able to do anything with the projects you created in our DAW". Going all-in with this either means you've got plenty of cash to burn, or you're banking on them maintaining the drivers for every new OS version, for as long as you want to be able to use your projects.

From a company that can't even get the base release ready on both operating systems at the same time, that's a big assumption.

Anyone who is already invested in UAD hardware will likely have more of an investment in the plugins than the hardware.
UAD are very good at retaining customers because of this.
The DAW is on top of that.

There is an entire class of UA customer (Pro Tools HDX users) that does not use their audio interfaces but still have £3k+ invested in plugins and just use them for mix down.

UA are one of the better companies for updates and their communication is pretty good too, certainly better than Avid.

Also, it is bad recording practice to not bounce out your session once you are done with the mix.
Every mix I do I bounce out with plugins, without plugins, and with stems.
Why?
Because the likelihood that 2-3 (or more years) down the line that I have the same system with the same capabilities is pretty rare.
Some plugins are EOL'ed (Cyclin' 74's Pluggo comes to mind, mix engines change, computers change, OS'es change.
Some sessions never come back the way they are meant to despite best efforts, so you bounce out track by track for safety.

WiresDreamDisasters

digitalscream said:

WiresDreamDisasters said:

digitalscream said:

So...I thought this was going to be revolutionary. How does this revolutionise anything?

It's a hardware-dependent DAW. We've had one of those for a couple of decades - it's called "Pro Tools"

I was only half taking the piss when I said it wasn't a DAW.

Luna will have direct access to the interface. No ASIO or CoreAudio required from what I can tell anyway. No additional buffers to deal with. No driver-induced latency. Everything runs directly on the card saving the need to rely on CPU cycles.

This is a pretty big deal.

Oh, I understand that. All I see, though, is "When you've moved away from our flavour-of-the-month hardware, you won't be able to do anything with the projects you created in our DAW". Going all-in with this either means you've got plenty of cash to burn, or you're banking on them maintaining the drivers for every new OS version, for as long as you want to be able to use your projects.

From a company that can't even get the base release ready on both operating systems at the same time, that's a big assumption.

How familiar are you with Universal Audio and their products?

PolarityMan

Well I do know that a bunch of previously UAD only stuff is appearing on plugin alliance and that improvements in the base hardware / OS and the steady march of progress is going to bring essentially zero latency monitoring out of the proprietary domain. Its already pretty easy to get sub 5ms latency without having to do any optimisation on a halfway modern system.

5 years ago that wasnt the case. 

digitalscream

WiresDreamDisasters said:

digitalscream said:

WiresDreamDisasters said:

digitalscream said:

So...I thought this was going to be revolutionary. How does this revolutionise anything?

It's a hardware-dependent DAW. We've had one of those for a couple of decades - it's called "Pro Tools"

I was only half taking the piss when I said it wasn't a DAW.

Luna will have direct access to the interface. No ASIO or CoreAudio required from what I can tell anyway. No additional buffers to deal with. No driver-induced latency. Everything runs directly on the card saving the need to rely on CPU cycles.

This is a pretty big deal.

Oh, I understand that. All I see, though, is "When you've moved away from our flavour-of-the-month hardware, you won't be able to do anything with the projects you created in our DAW". Going all-in with this either means you've got plenty of cash to burn, or you're banking on them maintaining the drivers for every new OS version, for as long as you want to be able to use your projects.

From a company that can't even get the base release ready on both operating systems at the same time, that's a big assumption.

How familiar are you with Universal Audio and their products?

Not massively. I am, however, very familiar with what vendor lock-in across multiple solution domains can do to folk, which is why I work incredibly hard to avoid it, and I'll accept compromises in workflow to maintain interoperability.

kjdowd

WiresDreamDisasters said:

digitalscream said:

So...I thought this was going to be revolutionary. How does this revolutionise anything?

It's a hardware-dependent DAW. We've had one of those for a couple of decades - it's called "Pro Tools"

I was only half taking the piss when I said it wasn't a DAW.

Luna will have direct access to the interface. No ASIO or CoreAudio required from what I can tell anyway. No additional buffers to deal with. No driver-induced latency. Everything runs directly on the card saving the need to rely on CPU cycles.

This is a pretty big deal.

It is. I had a first play around with it today and for tracking it's amazing. Not really mixed with it yet other than a very rough mix down. And it does sound very very good (the neve summing May be worth it by itself). 

I have a feeling I'll be going between Luna and Logic while Luna matures and gets a richer feature set (although, that said, at first glance I couldn't see anything missing in Luna that I really need), and some of the workflow is going to take some getting used to, but first impressions are very good indeed

octatonic

They have done a great job.

The obvious missing features are no side chain capability, no keyboard command for nudge, no rewind/forward from key command, no configurable key commands (specifically this is an issue if you don't have an extended Apple keyboard and want to, say, toggle the metronome from a key command, because that is on the numeric keypad, or you have to use a mouse... like a chump.)
There is some other stuff too- but this is a 1.0 release, so it is impressive as hell thus far.
They will get there.

Realistically I am years away from adopting it as my main DAW, if at all though.

The fact that they can get this so right so fast shows me how much of a disaster Avid are right now, and I say that having over 20k invested in Pro Tools HDX. DSP is still king for the lowest latency tracking and AVID owned the market.
For UA to come in and do so well should be a lesson to Avid to stop pissing about.

Stuckfast

WiresDreamDisasters said:

Luna will have direct access to the interface. No ASIO or CoreAudio required from what I can tell anyway. No additional buffers to deal with. No driver-induced latency. Everything runs directly on the card saving the need to rely on CPU cycles.

It definitely isn't the case that everything runs directly on the card. The closest comparison is probably something like Pro Tools HD Native.

The LUNA mixer incorporates the functionality of the Console, to provide low-latency paths that allow inputs and up to two auxes to be routed directly to outputs. These run on the card and can have UAD plug-ins on them. They are switched quite cleverly on the fly so you don't need to worry about latency while tracking as long as you don't want to use native plug-ins. In other respects, though, LUNA's mixer is just like those in other DAWs, running natively on the host machine and requiring buffering. I don't know whether it uses Core Audio or a proprietary driver protocol.

As for saving CPU cycles... so far my impression is that LUNA is somewhat heavy on these, though I should test it on a faster computer before complaining too much.