Our Manifesto
The way we create sonically today is broken.
It's broken because many of us work more closely with remote collaborators than ever before, but we lack a seamless yet secure way to share.
It's broken because our projects are larger and more complex than ever before, but we often don't have enough local storage in our studios to safely contain years' worth of projects, without archiving.
It's broken because our most treasured current projects, often not even yet completed, are being used to train AI models by cloud providers against our will.
How do we, as a creative community of audio professionals, move forward to simultaneously reclaim our files and bring our work closer to our physical locations, while also making it easier and more secure for our collaborators and clients to remotely access the work?
How do we achieve this without being subjected to the constant onslaught of subscription-based services?
We do it by taking these first principles, and rethinking what the studio of tomorrow really needs.
We start by eliminating the cloud
For all the benefits cloud computing has given us, seemingly limitless storage, access from anywhere, and reasonable access control, it has slowly eroded the things we took for granted. Storage is not unlimited unless your budget is also unlimited. Access is indeed available from anywhere, but the speed of synchronizing large projects becomes brittle. And access control remains problematic when it comes to the unique needs of audio professionals.
We solve this with Haven. Tonic Audio's Haven product is the first network-attached storage (NAS) device built from the ground up to serve the needs of producers, soundtrack composers, mixing and mastering engineers, songwriters, and anyone who cares about the craft of audio production.
When we say built from the ground up, we mean it. We designed the entire product, from specifying the CPU, chipset, memory, network, and storage components, to designing the motherboard and interface circuit boards, to choosing the ideal redundant file system for minimizing data-loss and downtime, to integrating our Tonic Audio software directly onto the unit, usable with a clear, high-resolution touchscreen, to even choosing audiophile DACs for critical listening. All of this fits in a convenient, 1U 19" rackmount unit. Alternatively, remove the rack ears, and it fits nicely under the display on your studio desk.
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware – Alan Kay
Another way to think of Haven is like a massive hard drive connected to your DAW. However, it's smart. It supports unlimited file versioning, can easily hold millions of files, offers comparable speed to your current DAW accessing files locally, and can also share any folders, projects, or files with anyone. All without the cloud.
Speaking of sharing, few creative disciplines require as much deep, vulnerable collaboration as audio production does. There is a deep sense of trust, clarity, and communication that comes with working collaboratively with others in the audio and music world. You need to trust that your counterparts can easily listen to and directly access the output you're creating, without compression or other unwanted artifacts.
Relying on existing cloud solutions to accurately provide your work—uncompressed yet secure—is difficult to achieve. Those services that claim to do so will still be fundamentally limited by the speed of the internet. Since Haven works locally, your only limitation is your computer's speed.
Then to secure collaboration
Haven really shines when it comes to collaboration. Seamless syncing without the cloud. If your collaborator also has a Haven, you can easily set up a mirrored project. Any changes on one device will automatically appear on the other device, bi-directionally. If your counterpart does not have a Haven, they can use the Haven mobile or desktop app to access the project that resides on your Haven directly from their device.
Haven uses what are essentially small encrypted channels directly between collaborators to do its synchronization. Think of these as tiny VPN channels: very secure, very private. In fact, nobody can determine that you're even sharing anything at all. It's a true device-to-device secure tunnel, directly connecting the two, with no cloud needed.
In fact, if you want to truly protect your work in progress, you can leave your Haven disconnected from the internet altogether and only use it as a high-availability local storage device. Power it down, and your data is completely inaccessible to anyone, anywhere.
And finally, reliable backups
The last and perhaps the most important thing. What happens when something goes wrong? Inevitably, things break, devices wear out, files can be lost forever. How can Haven ensure the data it holds is not only ultra fast and secure, but also securely backed up in case of catastrophe?
Haven has several ways to securely and transparently back up your entire dataset—either to your own offsite backup location or using Tonic Audio's optional backup solution. Regardless of where you back up your Haven files, snapshots of the entire studio are encrypted locally before being stored anywhere remotely. This ensures that no matter who you choose as a backup service provider, your data will look like random noise to anyone trying to access it. Even Tonic Audio is unable to see or recover your files. Backups are critical, but we make it easy.
We spent several years building what we believe is quality audio collaboration software for people who need deep connection with their collaborators. However, we kept encountering the same fundamental problems all cloud providers face. It's slow, doesn't sync well, almost always requires a subscription of some sort, and it's becoming more difficult to prevent wanton AI scraping of any and all data stored, even if we don't do it ourselves.
After talking with many of you about what you truly need to run your studio, agency, or project, it became clear that we had to reinvent ourselves and, in the process, create something that doesn't exist today.
That something is Haven. We think it's the future of audio production, and we want to get it into your hands.