Screenshot from Zoom
The Conservatory of Recording Arts and Sciences was pleased to host an online Zoom event with DAWn Audio on August 25th. Presiding over the meeting was the CEO of DAWn Audio, Diego Pinzon. DAWn Audio allows collaboration between multiple DAW's, making the creation process simpler for countless collaborators.
Mr. Pinzon opened the meeting by asking those in attendance to introduce themselves by describing what is is that they do within the audio industry, why they signed up for the event, a recent song that they've been listening to, and "If you could change one thing about the music industry, what would it be?" Upon completing introductions, Diego commented on the importance of the time that was taken to ensure everyone was introduced: "What we're trying to build here is really a community grounded in independent artists. And so in that it's important to understand who the individual artist is and what it is that drives you, motivates you, and brings you into the space."
Diego explained how the creation of DAWn Audio came to be, recollecting back to a class project as engineering students: "We met as engineering students working on this as a class project. Basically after a year of working in class, and feedback from professors and advisors telling us that we should really turn this into something, we decided to roll with it."
Diego explained the importance of inter-DAW compatibility: "The fact that there's dozens of these DAW's and there's no compatibility between them means that we're wasting time. We found that there's an average of two hours lost in sending these songs. That means that professional artists are losing 15 to $40,000 per year, because two hours per song leads to potential revenue loss."
Mr. Pinzon elaborated further on how detrimental this issue can be for creative energy as well:
"But again, worst of all, it's this point of killing the creativity. Somebody said, you have to export, send export, send export... That's not how creativity should flow. If you have to wait for feedback every time you're working on a song, the idea's gone by the time that feedback comes in."
Diego explained that what sets DAWn apart from other programs that offer similar solutions is the capability to work cross DAW's, as well as the ability to edit each other's projects live and remotely. Diego then played a video of an example of DAWn's capabilities. "I was in New Orleans, Sam was in New York, entirely different cities, and you still have that live manipulability editing and it's cross DAW. I was using Logic. He was using Ableton." The demonstration showed how DAWn Audio gives you the ability to synchronize two projects from separate DAW's via an internet connection, as well as giving each user the ability to make edits to the other's project. "You have that live user flow that replicates in-studio co-creation, but within different DAW's and from different cities."
Diego noted that DAWn initially was a web application, but it has recently become a native desktop application. "A lot of the actual processing happens on the web server side of it, where we're hosting it in AWS. Again, we're just a middle man. So you need to provide your own DAW. DAWn by itself won't make sound or make music... Our larger goal by the time that we're commercially launching this product is to have a plugin embedded in your DAW."
Diego proceeded to show a clickable prototype of the software to further discuss how DAWn will be implemented upon its release: "So you would log in, join your room, and in the session, we would have screen share functionality. Right now you can only see your own DAW, but you can still make edits and changes to the other co-creators. With this added functionality of the screen share, say Malik wanted to make edits to my project when he clicks my profile or my name he's able to visually see my project. It's not remote control feature in terms of what you see with like Team Viewer or Zoom, because that limits actually manipulability. If we were to implement that approach, which we've seen other solutions also implement, everyone has to be working on the same project at the same time.
Whereas with ours, you're simply viewing my screen at the same time that I could be viewing Tyler's and Chris can be viewing his own. And we're all still able to make those changes."
Mr. Pinzon reiterated that DAWn Audio was still in its beta testing phase, and this was the reason that the introductions at the beginning of the meeting were so important. "We're really looking to establish a solid base of people who are excited about the fact that you're able to really contribute to the development of what this application's gonna look like. We really value the feedback of these early artists that we have onboard the platform."
A question regarding the estimated price of DAWn Audio upon its release was brought up. "So we did a lot of price testing at NAMM. Right now our plan is to implement an annual subscription. We might shift to a monthly subscription to make it more accessible, but an annual subscription priced at $99 a year... So again, we want any and all feedback. We want it to be accessible by the independent artists. We don't wanna contribute to starving musicians."
Towards the end of the event, those in attendance were invited to sign up to skip the waitlist for the release.
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