Digital Audio Workstation Front End Development Struggles

1

ossia score

Some comments on the issues mentioned at the beginning of the article as I had the same questions in https://ossia.io: - DAWs have a lot of toolbars and panels (browser panel, timeline panel, piano roll panel, fx rack panel, mixer panel, audio editor panel, automation editor panel, settings panel, etc.). For this Qt always performed brillantly for me. I went from QDockWidget to QSplitter-based layout though. - Some widgets like decibel meters and other visualizers are constantly being animated, meaning the GUI library needs to efficiently redraw the screen every frame. All the CPU-based toolkits will only redraw what changed though - In addition, visualizers can be expensive to render on the CPU (especially spectrograms/spectrometers). Ideally you should use custom shaders to render them on the GPU. fair, but then you may pay the cost of a GPU -> CPU transfer which isn't always free - Clips on the timeline are notoriously expensive to render. There needs to be some way to cache the contents of clips into a texture (Either directly or by making use of the GUI library's "damage tracking" which I'll get into later.).

#Audio Player #Media Player #Music 13 social mentions

2

Photon Micro GUI

#Development Tools #Rapid Application Development #Game Engine 6 social mentions

3

Ultralight

I agree web stuff is really the best way to develop UIs. Good luck making responsive stuff in C++ for example. The paradigm of HTML, CSS, and JS is extremely powerful and even allows you to use canvas, webgpu, wasm. There are multiple commercial projects that use web dev paradigm for GUIs: https://coherent-labs.com/ https://ultralig.ht/.

#Development Tools #Rapid Application Development #Cross-Platform Development 31 social mentions

4

Sciter

I agree web stuff is really the best way to develop UIs. Good luck making responsive stuff in C++ for example. The paradigm of HTML, CSS, and JS is extremely powerful and even allows you to use canvas, webgpu, wasm. There are multiple commercial projects that use web dev paradigm for GUIs: https://coherent-labs.com/ https://ultralig.ht/.

#Development Tools #Rapid Application Development #Cross-Platform Development 67 social mentions