I only thought of this today and I don’t know if it’s a good idea or a bad idea - but here goes…
I noticed that there’s now a wide variety of musical styles here including jazz, rock & pop, latin and other ethnic styles of music. I wondered if it might be helpful for some of these to be offered in a ‘Welcome pack’ for new Ardour users? Obviously, no-one would be expected to contribute their entire album! But maybe if they had a particular track that demonstrated some of the features of Ardour or Mixbus they might like to donate the Ardour session file. The basic idea would be to give new users something to experiment with while they were taking their first steps with Ardour.
Obviously it would need to be done in such a way that recipients couldn’t subsequently go around claiming ownership of the work! So maybe there could just be some basic instrument tracks (without a vocal or a lead instrument say) or alternatively, there’d be some jazz or traditional songs that are now out of copyright.
With the wide selection of music that’s been posted here I’m sure there could be something to suit all tastes - and I think it would be very encouraging for new users to see the possibilities that Ardour and Mixbus can offer.
Not a bad idea, and in fact one way of doing some great tutorials, and one I have considered whether I can do with a DVD if I ever finish up since I know the guy the wrote it and he still owns all copyrights of course.
interesting idea. Last time I saw something like this was in “Cool Edit Pro”. I think it would offer new users an easy way to play around with tracks, faders, some preconfigured plugins, automations etc. and learn what’s possible.
You just need an artist, who sponsors his project(s). I remember there the propellerheads who did this for their program reason - great thing and you can see how powerful a program could be.
May you find some artists here: http://www.jamendo.com/en/creativecommons .All styles are represented. For this the production should be cc-licensed with derivative works allowed.
I’m actually working on a version of this idea as we speak. I’ll be giving away the project files for a couple of songs in both .zip files and .deb for debian based systems. These will be licensed as creative commons noncommercial sharealike: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/ , which means anyone can use them for noncommercial purposes as long as derivative works are also released under the same license (similar to the GPL for software). Apart from that, I’ll also offer full copies of my albums as Ardour project, although those will be a pay-only option (complete with a functioning distro with a copy of Ardour in it, for anyone who might not already have it). I’m currently focused on getting a beta release of my distribution out the door, but expect to see packages like these posted to this forum by early next week. (BTW, my packages will contain not only the Ardour projects, but also Hydrogen, Midi files, Soft-Synth patches, Jamin sessions, Gimp and Inkscape files of album artwork, and even perhaps video project files in the future - all one needs to learn how to create an album from start to finish)
I didn’t listen to a massive number of songs but it seemed that they’re mostly being hosted on the composer’s own web site. So I figured that if any composer was amenable, they could also host a zipped up ardour session (of maybe one or two songs) exactly like you just described. This would allow the composer to retain control over the situation (e.g. to remove the material if there were any abuses of the scheme) and it would also mean that there’d be no onus on Paul to handle any administration. All that would be needed would be for each composer (if he wishes) to post an appropriate link in a thread on this forum. I’ll keep a lookout for your links over the next few weeks.
I would be happy to host a service like this, perhaps with the trade-off being that I could include these free projects in the default install of my freely-available distro? If anyone is interested in taking part in such a thing, email me.