How did a laptop become a recording studio?

A laptop can be a recording studio because a digital audio workstation, or DAW, is just an electronic device or application software used for recording, editing and producing audio files. The idea is older than you might think. In 1978 the company Soundstream built what could be considered the first digital audio workstation, using some of the most current computer hardware of the time. For years such attempts were held back by the high price of storage and the much slower processing and disk speeds of the 1970s and 1980s.

Then personal computers caught up. By the late 1980s the Macintosh, Atari ST and Amiga had enough power to handle digital audio editing. In 1991 Digidesign introduced Pro Tools, and many major recording studios switched to digital audio. Its design was modelled on the traditional signal flow of analog recording, and DAWs generally follow a multitrack tape recorder metaphor, so engineers who knew tape could learn them quickly.

The biggest change may be the humblest button. Perhaps the most significant feature not available in analog recording is undo, which makes it much easier to avoid accidentally erasing or recording over a previous recording. A computer DAW can also offer a practically limitless number of tracks, and virtual synthesizers.

Home recording, recording sound at home instead of in a professional studio, grew with it. Reel-to-reel machines were practical only for professional studios and wealthy artists, until Tascam's Portastudio of 1979, a small four-track machine for consumers. The cost of professional audio equipment has dropped steadily in the 21st century, and information about recording is easy to find online. The result: many commercial studios have gone out of business, and, as Maureen Droney of the Recording Academy told the Los Angeles Times, the business has come full circle, back to being small and entrepreneurial.