If you are a musician who records from home, you've probably come across a problem. Your recording area will be set away from your computer workstation, so when you want to record some audio, you have to walk over to your computer, hit record, then go over to your instrument to start playing.
There are some solutions to this, including using a MIDI controller, or dedicated DAW controller, but if you aren't going to use them often, it's an unnecessary expense. It's quite an expensive device if you only want one button!
The solution is to roll your own. After all, most DAWs can be controlled via MIDI, and the Arduino can output MIDI no problem - we've seen loads of other creative projects that use an Arduino to output MIDI. All you need is a MIDI socket (or Teesny or HIDuino for a USB version) and some simple code.
Peter Stretz shows us how he made his own DAW remote using a push button, some general electronics parts, and some scripting in Cubase. Although he uses Cubase in his setup, it should be simple to convert into other DAWs. The hardware and code will stay the same, but the way the DAW react will be different. For example, Cubase uses a sort of script to map to the transport, where Ableton Live will allow to simply right click the record button and MIDI learn.
If you want a little more control, you can add more buttons to your project. You can have separate buttons to control play, record, stop and rewind, as well as add potentiometers to control the master volume level and tempo.
You can check out his Instructables page to see all the code and schematics, and make your own DAW controller.