Behringer is making a free new DAW with VST plugins

Behringer wants complete music industry dominance — or at least its parent company, Music Tribe, does. The company has announced that it is developing its own digital audio workstation — and the company says that it will be free.

“It’s now official. We will be creating our own Music Tribe,” said Behringer in a statement on Facebook. “…Best of all, the DAW will be FREE of charge! Our goal is to empower all musicians to record, mix, edit and publish their music.”

Of course, it remains to be seen exactly how free the DAW really is. For example, it’s possible a stripped-down version of the DAW will be free, while you’ll have to pay for more advanced features. Alternatively, the DAW itself could be free, but the accompanying plugins may come at a cost. That said, Behringer says that the DAW will include “sample VST’s,” plus “connections to third-party VST’s.” On top of that, it will have multiple user interfaces for different kinds of music production, including for recording and for DJs.

It also may be a while before you can actually use the new Music Tribe DAW. Behringer says that the project will take at least 18 months and that it has put together a large development team for the project.

The project is a pretty significant undertaking for the company. Not only is it difficult to actually build a new DAW, but even if it does make a great product, it will still then have to convince users to switch to its new offering. Still, the company has been on a roll of building awesome new products, so it’s possible that alone will be enough to convince users to try out a new DAW.

Of course, the fact that the DAW will be free also makes users more likely to try out the DAW. After all, even if users don’t end up liking it, they won’t have had to pay for it in the first place.