A little over a year ago, I wrote a post about some fascinating music tech that was coming out at the time. A year later, Cubase 14 officially supports the .DAW file format, allowing users to share files between other DAWs that support it such as bitwig and Studio one.
This technology allows for the transfer of DAW projects between different DAWs, including clips, tracks, channels, groups, audio, notes, automation data, third party plug in settings & more. As a media composer, this can be a really useful tool when transferring data between Cubase and Protools for instance (if/when PT gets .DAWproject support) and prepping for recording sessions. Saving time as well as money if you are paying an assistant to do this. This also reduces the likelihood of user error in the session set up by eliminating many potential points of failure and streamlining the transfer process. Automation and crossfades are not supported in the initial Cubase 14 release, but are in development and should be released in a future maintenance update.
What's also interesting is this also opens up the market to allow composers of different DAWs to collaborate with each other more easily. Similar to the early days of online gaming when you could only play with people on your platform, you can now share files back and forth with other composers and use the tools most comfortable for you (assuming more DAWs adopt this) rather than being forced to adapt to one another's set ups. As a composer doing additional music for a film, show, or game - this can also be highly useful and open up a whole new world of collaboration opportunities.
That all being said, this feature is not as polished and easy as one would like. There are still many improvements to be made, but the adoption of this technology by one of the major DAWs promotes a very promising future for it and hopefully forces others to adopt it as well. The .DAWproject format is an open source, so it can be implemented by other DAW developers - so if this interests you I highly recommend pushing your favorite developers to incorporate it. Here is the github for the code.
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