Internet based recording collaboration

Hi guys, I’ve been toying with the idea of an open source Internet based recording collaboration site.

Essentially it’d be a way to upload your songs and share them with others in your project (or maybe meet people there) and work with them. It’d be broadband essential I guess.

I don’t really have coding skills to design an engine, so right now its all pie in the sky. I think I could do an okay job mocking up a process design, sys-admin, etc.

It’d have to be pretty useful, but I think it could be done.

Any ideas?

It definitely wouldn’t be “real-time”.

There is Ardour session exchange which acts both as a client and server to distribute Ardour sessions over a TCP network. It’s created to make collaboration easier - it only transfers what has changed, not the entire session.

Then there is ninjam, http://www.ninjam.com/
“NINJAM is a program to allow people to make real music together via the Internet. Every participant can hear every other participant. Each user can also tweak their personal mix to his or her liking. NINJAM is cross-platform, with clients available for Mac OS X and Windows.”

ideally id love to put a web point and click face on that capability.

Interesting, check this too:

llcon, Low-Latency (Internet) Connection tool

The task is to build a client/server software to enable musicians to play together over the internet. Target internet connection is DSL with 256 kbps upstream and 1 Mbit downstream. The server software must be located at a server with a very fast internet connection (at least 1 Mbps for up- and downstream) and a very low ping time.

…and LDAS - Low Delay Audio Streamer could be usefull too:

LDAS is primarily developed to be used as a tool for research into distributed multimedia interaction and perceived quality of service. It is aimed at demanding applications where very low latency transmission of high quality multichannel audio is needed. It is developed from scratch in order to have a solution that is fully open, suitable for our research tasks and with control over all aspects and parameters of the transmission process. The current plan is to release the software under the GNU GPL license. An early version will be released Real Soon Now(TM).

Marco Ravich

note: again, an Haiku port would be great !!!

Asking for a Haiku port multiple times does not make Haiku a more interesting platform for Ardour. I have already explained our position and presented an option for Ardour on Haiku on http://ardour.org/node/408 .

Our limited developer pool has a lot more pressing issues than this. But like I said earlier, you are very welcome to do it by yourself or get Haiku developers interested. :slight_smile:

Interesting: your reply is focused on my note…

BTW i’m not a developer and yes, i already asked Haiku devs a port here but they seems not interested too (at least according to this comment):

I think we can do better than Ardour and GNOME, really.

Last but not least, the Ardour port request is a part of a more wide-breath project: HA.M.P.S.

Marco Ravich

(note: are we going OT ?)

well I’ve started to teach myself Ruby, which hopefully will lead to development in Ruby on Rails.

of course, its a very long process. hope in 6 months I might be able to come back to this thread with a link!

cheers

found this thread while searching for session-exchange, recommended to me by ron parker. I have been interested in a similar idea for a while. niko123456, get in touch with me if you are interested in my help. my first thought is to get ogg compression in session exchange to improve transfer speed…

colby.brown@gmail.com

I just discovered this: http://www.digitalmusician.net/

I am currently working on the same type of collaboration concept. Anyone interested may contact me. peter_willis_pi@yahoo.com

Seem’s like we’re not the only ones:

http://music.moldova.org/stiri/eng/44625/

I stumbled across this site and read Niko’s comment and questions about a multiple computer DAW. I have not found any comments referencing M$ Server 03.I have been interested in this concept strongly enough to take a Network Administration Degree Course. Before anyone freaks out consider this:
XP Pro by design will not recognize more than 3.2 gigs of RAM but, Server Enterprise Edition will recognize 32 gigs and 8 processors.

I’ve been meaning to get into using Ardour with more than one snapshot and then tinkering with Session Exchange (to some extent).

Was really interested if ‘ardour2-session_exchange.py’ (written by Taybin) can be used more like a SVN server? with branches being more like the snapshots (or not sure)…

And on top of that – some way to help on syncing audio files – flac/ogg (understanding that it won’t be sample accurate, because the samples now have changed with any lossy compression)… But close enough for collaborative works where different people submit “patches” (snapshots) and those additions are merged into a master branch (-head)… tracking updates might require some additional work for a lossy transport (like a checksum of the original file + it’s original snapshot name it was generated it) that is kept with the file as it goes through a lossy transport.

I am sure some of this can be done now but have NOT the experience.

Really need to find some information (or examples) on how to use A2’s session exchange tool.

–Doug

Is there a nice way to export a session and then tar it up for easy portability onto another user’s machine?

seems like there’s just “save” and “save as template”…

I have a web site I wanted to use to put stuff up on, for other people to use.

Perhaps a SubVersion-based approach would work?

Packet In did some of this in a roll your own sort of way for our first album done as a part of the RPM08 challenge.

Peter set up an ftp site and we took things from there.

We have tired to document our process for everyone:

http://packet-in.org/wiki/index.php?title=RPM_08_Thoughts_and_Concerns

There should be more than that on our process but I can’t find it with a quick glance. perhaps it is in our list archives…

We were compressing ardour tracks with ogg and wavpack on one end and decompressing them on the other end though.

Reviving the 3ad to ask interested devs to save Koblo, that seems is going to die.

http://koblo.com/

It’s (or it was) "an open source (GPLv3) a free, open source music editor with clever online collaboration features.

Inspired by how open source software is created, Koblo Studio lets you collaborate across the web with other musicians or band members.

Koblo studio runs on both Mac and Windows."

It would be great to involve Daniel Werner, the DarkWave Studio (a really-active optimized open source -GPLv3 too- DAW project) author, in the reviving…