Review Universal Audio LUNA

Universal Audio enters the ‘digital recording environment’ fray with LUNA. They don’t want us to call it a DAW but Jono Buchanan might just have to anyway…

Universal Audio’s reputation as a class‑leading software developer, who specialise in high‑quality emulations of recording history’s most coveted hardware is pretty much well established already. Equally, its Apollo audio interfaces are highly‑regarded because they sound great and also because their on‑board processors lighten the load on your computer’s CPU.

At January’s NAMM show, Universal Audio announced LUNA, a recording application which allows you to follow a UA workflow to a logical end; not only plugging instruments into its interfaces and using its bridging application Console to send processed signals onto your DAW, but to provide a recording environment into which they could be directly recorded.

You might be wondering why we’re taking such pains to avoid using the acronym ‘DAW’ here and instead using phrases like ‘recording environment’. The reason is simple; according to UA, LUNA is not a DAW.

According to us, it partly is. A first version DAW, certainly. One missing some options you might expect from an established DAW too. But what is here is really rather good and, at least once you’ve made recordings and are mixing and editing, it’s a DAW by most people’s definition.

The reason UA want to avoid the DAW acronym is because of ‘ARM: Advanced Realtime Monitoring’, which is at the heart of LUNA’s workflow. This technology allows you to configure Apollo‑hosted, latency‑free effects processing through which you can track and monitor recordings. No buffers to adjust, no one‑app‑to‑another‑app configuration to consider.

Just as an SSL console providing multiple channels of audio plus a computer hosting recording software to capture those channels don’t ‘add up to a DAW’, so UA’s contention is that LUNA is more than one of those too. LUNA