WHAT IS A D.A.W ( Digital audio Workstation ) ? 

Gone are those days when people considered music production as a time taking and expensive process .During those days, they had to worry about costly recording studio with expensive equipments to record a simple piece of music or a band . The cost and hard work required  was far beyond a layman’s budget or imagination. 

That was the time of reel-to-reel/open reel (audio) tape recording . It is the form of magnetic tape audio recording in which medium is held on a reel , rather than being securely contained within a cassette . Reel to reel tape was also used in early tape drives for data storage on mainframe computers, video tape recorders (VTR) machines and high quality analog audio recorders which have been used from early 1940’s, up till present .

ANALOG RECORDER ( REEL-TO-REEL)

Many famous musicians and artists have recorded using reel-to-reel tape as a part of the creative process like the The Beatles, Jimmi Hendrix and Aaron Dilloway and many more . 

ANALOG TAPE OF THE BEATLES

But time has changed and so has the technology . Because of the shift in technology, lack of portability and some disadvantages, Analog recorders were replaced with Digital recorders . In other words , people wanted something that is more Portable, easy to handle and more compact . In digital recording , audio signals are converted into a stream of discrete numbers, representing the changes over time in air pressure for audio, and then recorded to a storage device . 

With this change in technology , which was a big leap for musicians and engineers, more and more artist and talents started to come up as audio recording became a everyday work for many musicians as well as engineers . It was’t something which needed designated engineers or some high profile studio to record few a samples of audio . People started recording everywhere ; in their homes , in the car or even when flying . And the most important part of this whole technology change was that it was pretty inexpensive as compared to analog recording process . 

Today to record audio , we need a mic , an interface and a decent computer . But we needed some kind of software which can do this whole process of recording for us . That’s where a D.A.W(digital audio workstation) comes in . Basically, a D.A.W is an electronic device or computer software application for recording , editing and producing audio files . DAWs have a central interface that allows the user to alter and mix multiple recordings and tracks into a final produced piece .

DIGITAL RECORDINGS

But of course , like all of us know innovations have advantages as well as disadvantages both . As recording audio became more easily available the quality of product started depreciating . Not always but at many times people started to record everything on their own, with or without the proper knowledge and guidance . Initially DAWs were even expensive-but-limited units in 1970 , until 1980s till today where a powerful system can be built very inexpensively using open source software and consumer audio equipment even as a market exists for the professional high-end systems , essential in any modern recording studio . Many big studio’s till date use analog recorders and prefer quality then quantity . 

With computer systems available like that in the market today, it is always recommended to record in a studio with a proper engineer and equipments to record high quality product . 

Difference between analog and digital recordings 

- In analog technology , a wave is recorded or used in its original form .
- In digital technology , the analog wave is sampled at some interval , and then turned into numbers that are stored in a digital device .