Online real-time collaborative audio mixing: a new audio mixing paradigm

Professional studio-based audio mixing is an innately collaborative process characterised by interpersonal interactions crucial to the ultimate mix outcome. While the in-studio environment was once the aurum vexillum, remote audio mixing collaboration modes and practices are becoming increasingly prevalent and highly desirable. Even so, what would a remote professional audio mixing environment entail? Interviews with professional audio engineers revealed that the “ideal” remote collaboration experience must be comparable to an in-studio environment. Further investigations identified four critical remote collaboration requirements: real-time communication and interactions; mixing and monitoring high-resolution audio material; equitable localised access to and mixing control of a digital audio workstation (DAW) project; and the ability to scale to many remote participants. Prevailing online DAW audio mixing technology, practices and environments fall short of realising these requirements. Therefore, this research project aimed to develop and evaluate a framework, termed the DAW Collaboration Framework (DCF), that fulfils the critical remote professional audio mixing collaboration requirements. The challenges to overcome included Internet bandwidth limitations in which to stream real-time high-resolution audio, integration with existing professional DAW platforms, and an ability to scale to many remote participants. Ultimately, the DCF’s design avoids streaming high-resolution audio altogether, given that the DAW mixing project and audio files are distributed to remote participants beforehand. Instead, the DCF receives and transmits MIDI control data events generated by remote mixing operations executed at any participants’ DAW instantiation and synchronising all other instantiations in real-time. The DCF accommodates the four critical requirements by circumventing latency and fidelity issues associated with network audio streaming, scaling to multiple users with high-resolution audio mixing and monitoring capabilities, allowing for unified mixing control of a DAW project, and providing real-time communication and interactions through videoconferencing and text-based chat features. Deployment of the DCF in real-world audio mixing contexts with professional mixing engineers demonstrated successful operation in one-on-one and group environments and an acceptance of and satisfaction with the DCF’s novel mode of operation and audio mixing practice. The participants expressed enthusiasm for the framework’s potential to present new business opportunities for studio-based mixing engineers in broadening their reach beyond the studio’s physical location. Fundamentally, the DCF recognised the necessity of preserving interpersonal transactions in creative online collaborative endeavours and, along the way, unearthed a new collaborative audio mixing paradigm.