alt Hacker NewsSo want something like this but where the tracks are in the cloud.
I want to "check out" someone's drum loop and add a guitar riff. Check it into a branch.
Someone else checks out the drum+guitar, adds a bass line. Checks in.
"Jamming" with other people is one of the most fun things. To the degree that you can "get close" on the web…
RiffHub, anyone?
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I’m working on something close to that. At the moment it’s just for ableton. The idea is to be able to sync a daw project, binaries will be saved on cloudflare and then use git for certain cases where it’s possible to merge. In case one person is working on a bass line and another is working on a guitar part. I’ve been using git for this workflow but the idea to have use interface that’s legible for non git users
Have a look at https://opendaw.org/
I recently saw a talk of the developer who basically bootstrapped this. Open source and all, and he talked about the idea of collaboration and showed some features and forks that sounded like what you want.
The talk: https://youtu.be/BD7jQcuUOaA
Apple will certainly jump on this. They already have GarageBand and they are making the hardware more accessible in the form of the Neo MacBooks. They are good at capitalizing on that FOMO power. And by making it a part of GarageBand (which already makes use of iCloud), they can keep it in their ecosystem. Collaboration is already doable with shared files, but I’m sure they can streamline the process
Edit: and another comment alerted me to the existence of live jam sessions, so this would be a possible extension of it
Bandlab Studio, maybe? Never used it, but might be what you're looking for. There's a web version and a mobile app.
If that's just "turn-based collaboration" use the same DAW and a shared Drive/Dropbox/Whatever.
As a side note, is there any online community where you find people willing to do this? I’ve always struggled most with finding people eager to play and create music, especially as I get older. What you describe sounds like fun.
While not exactly the hub style you mentioned, maybe this is as close to Jamming you can get.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/guide/garageband-ipad/chsf2f...
I think that's what Soloist[1] is trying to do (unaffiliated, but I've met the founder)
Out of all web-based apps I've tried, audiotool matches your description the closest.
Yes. I’ve wanted something like this for a while. I’ve always wondered why there isn’t version control for DAWs. So many times I’ve spent hours editing a track and accidentally saved it without specifying a unique file name. Only to open it later and wish I could go back to before the changes that fucked it up.
Idk if the GitHub analogy really works for music.
With software, the code is a tool. And you can give the code away and still make money on hosting, support, enterprise sales, consulting, recruiting, whatever.
With music, the stem is the product.
If the drum loop is mediocre, nobody cares. If it's actually good, the creator usually wants ownership, licensing, royalties, exclusivity, or at minimum, attribution. But even at that level, it's trivial. Once you remove the triviality of it, it becomes art, which is the product.
People absolutely want cloud collaboration though. Shared sessions, async recording, version history, stem exchange, all of that makes sense.
But public forks of high quality musical material don't really compound the way software tools do. Most musicians are not trying to maximize downstream reuse of their riffs by strangers on the internet.
Yes if you’re collaborating with 10 people in the same project, otherwise non sense.
That reminds me of what Splice used to do
Could be pretty easy to do with atproto accounts. Users could save/share their music as a tangled.sh repo and other people could contribute or fork as they please. A nice UI could hide all of that and make it fun to collaborate on music.
Too bad I'm lazy. RiffHub looks neat.
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For a realtime-ish solution I wonder if you've seen Ninjam[1]? It used to be that most evenings one could find various populated rooms; the serverlist[2] shows that the infrastructure's all sat there ready for people to come.
You play over the most recent (eg) 16 bar repeat. At the end of each repeat, everyone gets the updated loop. It's easier to experience than describe but is surprisingly effective and bypasses a whole class of latency issues.
[1] https://www.cockos.com/ninjam/
[2] http://autosong.ninjam.com/server-list.php