# A New Daw !



## pobsky (Mar 14, 2018)

Hey guys, im wondering if anyone could help me or point me in the right direction to find out information on how much it might cost a new business to hire the right experienced software developers and engineers, questions im after are like how long it might take, the potential customers for a new successful product and any information on the process of this if a new Music company wanted to attempt to create a new Daw from scratch ! 

Its all part of a uni project im doing about startups and decided to use my music passion to base the subject of my research on and final proposal ! 

Thanks for any help 

Chris


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## Saxer (Mar 14, 2018)

Sorry for off topic, can't help with your question. I just read your thread title and can't get this out of my head:

It's a new DAW
It's a new day
It's a new life
For me
And I'm feeling good
I'm feeling good


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## pobsky (Mar 14, 2018)

Saxer said:


> Sorry for off topic, can't help with your question. I just read your thread title and can't get this out of my head:
> 
> It's a new DAW
> It's a new day
> ...



Ha funny that spot on! when i wrote it i knew there was something but couldn't quite think of it, and then you posted !!


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## pbattersby (Mar 14, 2018)

I don't think you can even get started on an accurate answer without a detailed requirements specification.

Asking how much it will cost to write a software program without a detailed list of requirements is like asking how much it will cost to construct a building without specifiing the square footage, number of floors etc.


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## pobsky (Mar 14, 2018)

pbattersby said:


> I don't think you can even get started on an accurate answer without a detailed requirements specification.
> 
> Asking how much it will cost to write a software program without a detailed list of requirements is like asking how much it will cost to construct a building without specifiing the square footage, number of floors etc.


yes i agree,what im asking is for any advice where i might i might find this information out with more research, this post is really the start of my research and ill continue and provide more details when im speaking to the right people of course


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## Tfis (Mar 15, 2018)

You should first know, what you want, you should know the market, the competitors,...,...,...,...
Start from the finished product and break it down...,..,..,,.,.,.,.
There are many structures and processes woven into each other...,...,...,....


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## Daryl (Mar 15, 2018)

pobsky said:


> Hey guys, im wondering if anyone could help me or point me in the right direction to find out information on how much it might cost a new business to hire the right experienced software developers and engineers, questions im after are like how long it might take, the potential customers for a new successful product and any information on the process of this if a new Music company wanted to attempt to create a new Daw from scratch !
> 
> Its all part of a uni project im doing about startups and decided to use my music passion to base the subject of my research on and final proposal !


Well, just to put things into perspective, when the Sibelius team was fired, that was 15 (I think) experienced people, hired by Steinberg, working from a London office given 3-4 years to come up with a new notation program, with an already existing, fully functional audio engine.


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## d.healey (Mar 15, 2018)

Detailed spec would definitely be required, and you'd need a lawyer or a few to help you navigate the patent mine fields.


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## MatFluor (Mar 15, 2018)

Well, from my brief knowledge of managing a few software development projects and the formal universitary training (IT Project Management was a part of my computational linguistics curriculum):

What are the requirements, what is considered the MVP?

As David pointed out as well, patents (the US patent system is broken beyond belief), other potential IP stuff. Essentially, the more poeple you can get, the faster it goes (but not proportionally of course). IF you have a clear spec at hadn it's much easier.

I build a platform for sign language training roughly 3 years ago together with two other devs, but the spec was very clear, we knew exactly what we should do, how it should look finally etc. Which in turn means - the platform (essentialy a webapp) was ready to use after 1.5 years, with requirement changes etc.etc. along the way.

So for something as big as a full-fledged DAW, it would take a considerable amount of time and good programmers (Audio Engine means almost Hardware level coding to make it snappy), which in turn means high salaries, which in turn explodes the costs up quite a notch.

But as said by others as well, without detailed specs, it's almost impossible to give anything _close_ to a number. Since it's a university thing, if you have a business or informatics faculty near you, ask them. Most likely they would have somebody specialized in IT Project management (which a DAW would essentially be), they could maybe provide you with some experience and pointers.


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## Vik (Mar 15, 2018)

pobsky said:


> information on how much it might cost a new business to hire the right experienced software developers and engineers


If you want to compete with the current DAWs, you would possiblhy have to calculate with several years of development and a quite large staff. 


> the potential customers for a new successful product


Successful - for whom? There are several "DAW markets". I guess you first need to find out what kind of DAW users you want to get.

Here's a list of many of the DAWs that already exist:
https://vi-control.net/community/th...ram-for-work-with-orchestral-libraries.43016/ You would have to compete with all these, and therefor come up with a unique DAW which offers something the others don't have. So first you need to know what kind of DAW you want to make, and spend a lot of time on designing the product before you start to code it. Sorry if this sounds pessimistic, just trying to be realistic.


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## d.healey (Mar 15, 2018)

You could always fork an existing free DAW like Ardour or Rosegarden to get you started


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## pilgrim (Mar 15, 2018)

I manage a team of software engineers for a living. There are a ton of factors going into something like this, but by making some wild guesses at upper and lower bounds you guess how many zeros the numbers might have, then start trying to refine the guesses. If you're serious about it, "Software Estimation: Demystifying the Black Art" by Steve McConnell out of Microsoft Press is the best book I've ever read about this sort of thing.

Lines of code are generally not a reliable metric, because what a line of code means is highly dependent on the environment and the team, and lines of code can be written and deleted and rewritten lots of time over the life of a project. That said, they can help for very rough estimations, so let's ignore all that .

Ardour is an open source DAW. (https://github.com/Ardour/ardour) Looking at code written for the project (ignoring its dependencies, some of which are copied into that repo), it has about 300,000 lines of code written in C++. Commercial DAWs are probably more complex than Ardour is, but they get that way by accumulating features over years of development, so let's just try to guess at an initial release.

Audacity (https://github.com/audacity/audacity) and Rosegarden (https://www.rosegardenmusic.com/) are DAW-like projects, and and their code is probably around 200k each, so in the range of Ardour.

Tuxguitar is a guitar tablature editor but it has some sequencer-like feature. It has a lot of redundant platform support, where the same code is written several times to be run in different places. It's core looks to be about 20,000 lines of java, while all of its platform support code is around 200,000. Let's guess that 100k lines gets you a working tuxguitar on a given platform, and maybe you don't care about all the guitar and notation bits, so you can shave a minimum viable product down to 50k.

So let's guess the minimum viable product with the features you want is somewhere between 50,000 lines of code (half a tuxguitar) and 300,000 lines of code (ardour) in complexity.

So how much does it cost to write that code? You need engineers and the stuff to make them productive. Let's say you can get that for somewhere between $25 (junior developers who work from home on their own hardware with no benefits) to $200 (senior developers with benefits plus real estate costs for the office for them to work in and the hardware to put on their desks and in the server room plus admin and managers and sysadmins and recruiting fees and all the rest) an hour.

Let's say each of those engineers averages somewhere between 5 and 25 lines of code added to the codebase per hour. This is definitely the most made up number here, and depends heavily on the project and the team, but you can find lots of people trying to estimate it.

That gives a low number of engineers working $25/hr to write 25 lines of code towards a tuxguitar-on-android sized project that will need about 50,000 lines of code. So that's going to burn through about $50,000.

Or a high number of $200/hr engineers averaging 5 lines of code an hour towards a 250kline ardour-sized project. In which case you can expect to burn through at least $10 million before you get something to the market.


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## SBK (Mar 15, 2018)

A new DAWn


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## pobsky (Mar 15, 2018)

I really appreciate all the advice from you guys which will really help me and my research on this going forward from now, ill just make a few points. 

I never expect to really make a startup business with the idea i have, the project is a about the research i do on my chosen idea and i need to show evidence of that of something similar which in my case to something succesful ( A Daw) and how i might be able to improve that with my startup idea! 

I know that it is likely i would need over $1.5 million of investment to even attempt to start what my idea would need going of my own estimates but i dont know this as a fact etc . and that is what i'm hoping to find out and show when i really get stuck into this! 

Thanks for all the info


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## pobsky (Mar 15, 2018)

pilgrim said:


> I manage a team of software engineers for a living. There are a ton of factors going into something like this, but by making some wild guesses at upper and lower bounds you guess how many zeros the numbers might have, then start trying to refine the guesses. If you're serious about it,
> 
> So how much does it cost to write that code? You need engineers and the stuff to make them productive. Let's say you can get that for somewhere between $25 (junior developers who work from home on their own hardware with no benefits) to $200 (senior developers with benefits plus real estate costs for the office for them to work in and the hardware to put on their desks and in the server room plus admin and managers and sysadmins and recruiting fees and all the rest) an hour.



Thanks for this reply ! kinda what i was hoping for to give me an idea of things, but now i need to find of how accurate your estimates are and when i do work out out much my own Software might cost from that to make


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