Immersive music production? The first Apple Vision Pro DAW
A new look and even more data offers artists a chance to fully explore how their music is performing on Pandora’s streaming service.
A professional recording studio at home is expensive. This DAW for the Apple Vision Pro may be the answer, producing a virtual music recording and editing space to work in.
The RipX DAW is the first music production software designed for use in Apple Vision Pro. The ambitious project promises to fill your room with music, allowing you to immerse yourself in your project and literally walk around your project to edit its elements.
With a 3D display that is projected into your room, you get a familiar DAW interface to work with. What makes this experience unique is that it’s 3D, allowing you to come at your project from an angle. Most impressive is the ability to blow up your project and tackle each element as fully editable notes in your room-filling timeline.
Software creators Hit’n’Mix write: “This is a DAW unlike any other. Walk around and interact with melody while it plays through you, just like it’s really there. This is a new way to create and enjoy sound that needs to be experienced to be believed.”
RipX DAW uses its own audio format – ‘Rip’ – to customise audio, which they claim to be a “giant step up from waveforms, enabling full control over all aspects of sound”. This allows simple customisation of individual clips, such as time-stretching and pitching, for experimenting bit by bit. Will this overcome the problem of creating a virtual music production space that is actually user-friendly? Probably not, though it may ease your 3D workflow as you walk from clip to clip.
The big issue with software like this is that it isn’t actually of benefit to have your project in a large virtual space. Navigating a timeline of coloured blocks trying to edit the audio therein simply sounds confusing and likely overwhelming in any project of considerable size. Then there is the issue of control accuracy – the mouse is a favourite for a reason, how will grabbing into space compare?
However, the creators are convinced that the visual element of their product can supersede it’s functional shortcomings. Warp Records artist Plaid says: “One of the key elements of working with audio files in RipX DAW is its ability to visualise the partials within a stem. Bringing this functionality to the Apple Vision Pro creates space for these visualisations and adds another level of immersion for artists wishing to explore audio with the latest technology.”
Is this enough to convince you music producers out there to take the dive with Apple’s latest product? It will cost you less than a full studio setup, but will still set you back $3,500 for the Apple Vision Pro. RipX DAW is currently £99 and RipX Pro DAW is £198, though we don’t know if the Apple Vision Pro version will be priced differently.
It seems that RipX DAW for Apple Vision Pro is a novel product, an example of the potential for music creation in an augmented reality space, but we’re not convinced that it will offer any elevation to actually spur serious producers to want to take their projects inside it.