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The Architect's Blog
December 27th, 2008

Think: Music

VRS is all about making music. I find it useful to always return to that. Sometimes it's easy to forget that focus, and get lost in an endless exercise of designing really cool new features that don't help people make music. VRS was born out of my own frustration in finding local musicians to record my first CD. I had all the music, lyrics and arrangements but no one to record the parts. I wound up playing most of the instruments, programming the drum machine, and singing the majority of the lead and backup vocals. Frankly my CD came out very one-dimensional. It was pretty good for a first effort, but it just sounded like me. Not at all what I wanted. I thought that maybe I could connect online with other musicians: Surely, I thought, there were other musicians somewhere in world that could help me record my music. But there was nothing at that time specifically designed as a music collaboration system. After months of trying to get someone to create a system, I just decided that I would do it myself.

Code

At the heart of VRS is the "Music" tab. This tab, available from every other VRS screen, allows you to list both your public and private music projects. The list contains everything you need to get a basic summary and status of all the projects you are working on. It show the Creator of each project, and has links to each project (project details), its chart, its unique project chat screen, and its unique project forum. It also shows the last time someone updated each project (or that project's forum). If anything has changed since you logged in last, it will be displayed in red. Your project list also shows how many tracks and mixes each project currently has, and how much disk space your project is using. The goal of the project list was to allow every VRS member to get an immediate picture of their various projects, and what has happened since they last logged in.

Repeat

Once I coded the project listing screen, I realized that it should form the core of the VRS system. Even though VRS is meant to be a social networking music collaboration system. I believe that every feature should ultimately support the goal of allowing musicians, mixers, songwriters, and producers to create music. I wanted VRS to produce music. Part of that thought was to code the VRS interface in a way that allowed VRS members to easily jump between features. That is why I chose a tabular/drop down menu interface. I realize that this makes VRS a bit overwhelming to new users, and I hope this blog will help remedy that. But my thinking was that each feature should support the task of creating a song, and should always allow VRS members to return to their music projects.