A digital audio workstation brings together, in one program, jobs once spread across a tape machine, a mixing desk, effects racks and a sequencer. Tracks of audio and MIDI are arranged on a timeline, edited, processed with plug-ins and mixed down to a finished file. Familiar examples include Ableton Live, Logic Pro, FL Studio, Cubase and Pro Tools.
The category grew out of late-1980s computer recording. Digidesign’s Sound Tools appeared in 1989, Opcode’s Studio Vision combined audio and MIDI editing in 1990, Pro Tools followed in 1991 and Steinberg’s Cubase VST introduced plug-ins in 1996. For many jazz lo-fi producers, a laptop DAW is the whole studio, sometimes paired with a hardware sampler such as an MPC or an SP-404.