Posted by pantelisk 1 day ago
Ahh I see you are one of the old ways, of the lost knowledge :)
I am very nostalgic for this style of development, even though I do not miss it in a team setting at all!
Super cool app you’ve made!
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?
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.
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
Edit: and another comment alerted me to the existence of live jam sessions, so this would be a possible extension of it
https://support.apple.com/en-us/guide/garageband-ipad/chsf2f...
Most DAWs allow you to "snapshot" a session at any time, and return to it as you want to. Certainly Ardour does that.
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.
Also I don't get the impression the idea is intended for "most musicians".
Too bad I'm lazy. RiffHub looks neat.
I also cannot understand why anyone would recommend Audacity.
I get flak for this, but Audacity is my "proof" that GIMP's name is why people don't use it, not the UI.
Like GIMP, Audacity's UI is awful, but people still use it. :)
as for the UI, i don't get it. what's so bad about it? and how is this one better? i looked at both and ardour too. so far audacity is the only one that has a feature to detect silence and label it. it's pretty easy to use too. i use this to detect chapters and create a chapter index for audio books. last one i did this week took only a few minutes, and most of the time was typing the chapter titles into audacity. i could not figure out how to do this in ardour or audiomass
Far more intuitive, I think. Keyboard shortcuts and cutting and pasting similar to what you'd get in e.g. Word.
(I'm a bit behind on web technologies nowadays)
One question: I tried the "Fade In" effect; is there a way to control its timing (i.e. the part of the clip where the effect is applied) ?
It seems like the inspiration went from Audacity, and with great changes to the design and feel of calmness and solidity!
I've tried loading a file with XM format, yet the current state of the import logic stated "Unsupported". Is there any chance you'll support the format?
For example, the following artwork is radiating charmingly in VLC:
- https://cable.ayra.ch/modplayer/mods/!Others/DYNAMITE_-_Winamp_5.0RC8_crk.xm
And, thank you! very much for the experiments, effort, miracles... art you do...On an unrelated note, I'm a little surprised there is no good open source web audio tracker (like Renoise but for the web) out there yet...
Unless part of your fun is keeping it so very trim, of course!
When I started developing I was a little frustrated with how bloated the web felt back then so I took that direction, it's much better today though and it's no longer an issue, but I still find it fun to impose these constraints and try to work within or around them (there's this fascinating concept of constrained creativity)
That said the web offers such great techniques to maintain this. Passive loading of plugins for example could keep things snappy and light and load things when you need them.
If you want the perspective of a prospective long term user: I'd be very comfortable using your app even at tens of megabytes. You could probably keep your initial load pretty light but pull in larger modules as needed. There are certain effects and audio layering I often use in Audacity that would keep me there, but your modern interface and browser access are huge selling points. If your vision includes moving to a bigger editor I guarantee you you'll find a huge base who wouldn't even notice megabytes of code.