NAMM 2017: Tracktion Waveform a DAW for Raspberry Pi, MacOS and Windows

19 Jan 2017 by Robin Vincent | Approximate reading time: 2 Minutes

Tracktion Waveform's new mixer · Source: http://www.minet.jp/brand/tracktion/top/

Tracktion Waveform's arranging · Source: http://www.minet.jp/brand/tracktion/top/

Tracktion Waveform's music mixing · Source: http://www.minet.jp/brand/tracktion/top/

Tracktion Waveform's music editing · Source: http://www.minet.jp/brand/tracktion/top/

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It appears that Tracktion Corporation, makers of the Tracktion T7 DAW, have developed a new, sort of evolved version. Information is a little unclear as my source is from a Google-translated Japanese website. Hopefully, we’ll get some more detail later today but here’s what we have.

Tracktion Waveform

Waveform is a DAW that follows the same lines as T7 with the single window approach. The biggest immediately obvious change is the existence of what looks like a decent, proper mixer. The lack of a traditional console view has always been the biggest flaw in Tracktion since the early days. Well, that seems to be sorted and they’ve certainly gone to town on it – nice one.

The demo video shows lots of nice zooming of the interface along with some new instruments. Tracktion has lots of interesting music generation features built into the clip editor and that seems to be present here.

But the feature they are focussing on is the support for the Linux-based mini computer, the Raspberry Pi. They say the coding is so streamlined that the Pi 3 will be able to pull off 20 to 30 tracks. It supports Linux VST plug-ins and their own BioTek synth is apparently working well. To help the Pi become an audio studio they are also releasing an audio I/O card. This connects directly to the ports on the Pi rather than via USB in order to keep the latency to a minimum.

I’m not entirely sure myself how helpful it’s going to be running your DAW on a Raspberry Pi. But it could make for a cheap and cheerful mobile system. If Waveform can transfer files between the Pi and the desktop then that might be quite interesting.

Does this mean that the T7 name is being retired in favour of the more generic “Waveform”? The answer turns out to be “yes”.

It will be available on Linux, Windows and MacOS in February or March.

Here’s the original story from Japanese website icon.jp. More information when we have it.

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