If you’re determined you can always buy packs and such. It’s really that stability and QoL/tooling you’re paying for. If your program is crashing multiple times every session - not to mention sometimes losing your work - it’s just going to kill any drive you have to create. And as you track more and more things, the ability to navigate all those tracks becomes even more critical, because eventually you will just become overwhelmed with what’s in front of you and the inability to move through it.

Adobe not withstanding none of these programs are ever that expensive either. I understand everyone has a different budget but if you can’t scrape together $100-$300 to buy essential software for something you want to do, then you probably have bigger issues on your plate. Hell, reaper is what? $40?

>If you’re determined you can always buy packs and such.

Im talking about what the biggest barrier will be to developing a DAW with LLMs. Buying the sounds doesnt let you redistribute them like that, you need commercial redistribution / software-embedding rights. The sounds people demand are going to be a bigger barrier than an agent coding it.

Your options are

1. synthesize the sounds yourself in code. LLMs aren't very good at this. Try it - you will play your sound next to a real TR808 recording and and think "this isnt even close".

2. Record a real machine yourself. Expensive and outside the domain of someone who only has coding experience. And with the 909 there may not even technically be a legal way to do it since some of the sounds are recorded and stored on the device, so you are essentially copy their recording. Many DAWs do do this but its murky.

3. License samples from a sound company. Normal sound pack licenses only cover making music with the sounds, not distributing them in a DAW. You’d need a custom OEM deal (contacting the company, negotiating, paying probably a lot, lawyer to check contract, etc).

4. License directly from Roland (not a thing as far as I know)

You need a real sound designer. But you could make a serviceable DAW with an LLM without having experience writing DAWs.

This is the same problem seen elsewhere, like video games. AI can do the code. It's the media that it can't really understand and someone without domain experience doesn't have the expertise, and doesnt even know what they don't know.