I've been playing with a new DAW and I gotta say, music production is still infuriatingly complicated. I'm using Native Instruments Kontakt and Bitwig in this particular instance. I need to "route" some notes connected from various tracks in Bitwig to a VST virtual instrument. I managed to make it work in 3 or 4 different ways, all of them requiring clicking through 3px-10px wide GUI controls (Kontakt doesn't support GUI scaling and everything is super small...). Things are hidden behind a trail of clicks in buttons, drop downs and select boxes ... frustation level: Lenny Kravitz's scarf.

music production feels like one of those things where a solo developer or small team could make a ridiculous amount of progress (and money!) with a little bit of domain knowledge and user research

hmmm I'm not sure about that. It feels to me audio development (and by extension audio apps) is a good exponent of ROPDD (rite of passage-driven development). By the time you get the expertise to develop and use these apps, you forget what a clusterfuck it is and you think things are ok just the way they are, or at most that the cost of change is too high and "things are not that bad".

Scoring is also horrible. OTOH, Ableton Live is definitely better than cutting up strips of reel-to-reel tape, so that's something...

incidentally if anyone hasn’t seen them yet, youtube user tantacrul did a series of interface critiques of music software that ended with him getting a job as head of product for MuseScore https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLsZOjdXUWZAd0D3rxIG7mD7VMGJfCdwzS

Tantacrul is a favorite. Jank Man!

I totally agree that DAW’s are way too complicated. As a side note, if you ever find yourself wanting to liberate native instruments hardware or software, this project I did a while back might be of assistance https://github.com/SamL98/NIProtocol

Curious if people have any opinions about what's going on in the iOS music production ecosystem? E.g., GarageBand, Korg Gadget, and Auxy all represent a different, simpler, philosophy for music production than desktop DAWs. Correspondingly, it appears to me that a lot of the complexity in DAWs is incidental complexity in supporting an open systems, e.g., hosting plugins, audio routing between applications (nuts to me that this isn't just a standardized OS-level feature), MIDI/MPE/OSC for interfacing with hardware. Auxy and Korg Gadget achieve their simplicity by being closed (e.g., no support for Audio Units), so their simplicity comes at the expense of flexibility. GarageBand also achieves it's simplicity while being less flexible, albeit it can at least host plugins. There's also the AUM/Audiobus ecosystem iOS, which has a fundamentally different approach (arguably even more modular then desktop DAWS, e.g., unbundling the sequencer from the mixer) to desktop DAWs, but it ends up being equally complex. Not a great situation, but it appears to me that complexity seems to always come with open, flexible, workflows. I'd love to hear counterexamples of this, e.g., apps that are both powerful and simple? Are those always contradictory?

I only tried Korg Gadget from this list, and yeah, the fact it is "closed' w/no pluggable options makes it feel a bit like a toy. Also, I can't plug my mouse and keyboard to it (I used it on Switch, but I assume is the same for iPhone?)

Korg Gadget actually has a decent Mac version that supports mouse and keyboard. But yeah same thing for me about not supporting AU being a showstopper. Gadget is actually one of my favorite music making environments, because the built-in instruments are so consistently good (Gadget achieves depth via breadth). But if you want to do anything that they don't support, you're stuck, so I end up rarely using it. But that means resigning myself to more tedious workflows. It’s one of the examples that always has me thinking of this “great workflows” vs. “flexible” split. Music making, and seemingly most areas, you have to pick one or the other, you can’t have both.