In the field of professional broadcasting, an end-to-end workflow (from ingest to playout) is called tapeless when part, or all of it, is made without any use of audio tape recorders or videotape machines; video and audio sources being ingested, recorded, edited and played out entirely on digital video systems.
The availability of low cost disk and high-powered CPUs and GPUs in modern computers has also made it affordable for even amateur productions, and often cheaper than solutions using professional tape formats.
It is generally believed that digital tapeless recording is the most robust and easy-to-manage solution for audio and video production.
Nevertheless, particularly within the audio world, there has been significant demand for returning to all-analog, even vintage, recording equipment, to achieve a softer, "warmer" sound at the expense of precise sound replication.[when?
][citation needed] This has not so much been the case with video production, as vintage equipment is often inoperable or unable to work with current technology, and generally lacks the quality achieved by digital video technology.