They will need arm builds sadly so the list is likely going to be rather small.

Isn't the entire idea that you hook it up to physical hardware?

If not using hardware, you just click and move horizontally or vertically; not sure what a better interface would be? Though I do like it when the numeric value shows when changing. I really don't know what other UI would work well here. Usually there are so many knobs it makes sense to be compact. Though really it makes sense as well to match the visualization of the knobs on my midi controller anyway.

It allows for dense controls and everyone's used to them. I don't find them to be a problem, they aren't intuitive in that you might think you're supposed to grab the knob and "turn" it with a circular cursor motion or something, but once you learn to drag linearly, they're an easy to use and consistent interface. And as giancarlostoro mentioned, you can map them to a MIDI device if you want to twiddle knobs while playing/recording live.

most daws allow you to map hardware to the dials so u dont need to tweak by mouse. that being said, good automations are a fair replacement depending on your style of music. lfos, adsrs and pattern tools for automation lanes aswell as ability to record automations (to keep em consistent, modify manually etc ), and ofc humanization algorithms that u can apply to automation lanes.

i never use 'hardware', totally happy doin what i do. (thats music i think. enjoying your craft). most ppl i know using similar tools do have midi controllers to have more of an instrumental interface. theres tons of options. no need to discourage anyone...

On the other hand turning a knob with a mouse wheel is the best interface I can think of.

> Turning a knob with a mouse is the worst interface I can think of.

I'm racking my brain thinking of what a better interface would be for selecting a number between a range of values, where the number is a point on a continuum and not any specific value, and can't think of one. The equivalent "traditional" UX for webapps would be a slider control, but that's functionally the same and you'd be going against many years of domain-specific common understanding for not much benefit.

irony amplified by the nature of the tech stacks xD surely they can figure out some channel to communicate over clearly haha

This is very much not true.

Telephony is significantly less latency sensitive than real time audio processing, it’s also significantly less taxing since you’re dealing with a single channel.

The level of compression and audio resolution required are significantly different too. You can tune codecs for voice specifically, but you don’t want compression when recording audio and can’t bias towards specific inputs.

They’re only similar in that they handle audio. But that’s like saying the needs of a unicycle and the needs of an F1 car are inherently the same because they have wheels.

This is a very interesting thought. I'm not super experienced with low level audio and basically completely ignorant of telephony.

I feel like most people doing audio in music are not working at the low level. Even if they are creating their own plugins, they are probably not integrating with the audio interface. The point of JACK or Pipewire is to basically abstract all of that away so people can focus on the instrument.

The latency in music is a much, much bigger issue than in voice, so any latency spike would render network audio completely unusable. I know Zoom has a "real time audio for musicians" feature, but outside of a few Zoom demos during lockdown, I'm not sure anybody uses this.

Pipewire supports audio channels over network, but again I'm not entirely sure what this is for. Certainly it's useful for streaming music from device A to device B, but I'm not sure anybody uses it in a production setting.

I could see something like a "live coding symphony", where people have their own livecoding setups and the audio is generated on a central server. This is not too different than what, say, Animal Collective did. But while live coding is a beautiful medium on its own, it does lack the muscle memory and tactile feedback you get from playing an instrument.

I would love to see, as you said, these fields collaborate, but these, to me, are the immediate blockers which make it less practical.