TheNetStudio.com

Internet Music Collaboration

Think.Code.Repeat.

The Architect's Blog
February 20th, 2009

Think: Tracks, Mixes, Finals

As I began to work through my ideas on what a Virtual Recording Studio would provide, I thought about what musicians, mixers, and producers would do in the real world. And how I could emulate those activities online. But that was just the starting point. I wanted to make VRS activities and concepts familiar to musicians, mixers, and producers, so that they would immediately feel comfortable using the system.

However, I felt (and still feel) that the real advantage of VRS is not in just emulating the familiar. But rather, to take advantage of Internet technologies to introduce new, creative, and more effective ways of creating music.

Code

The most familiar things in a multi-track recording are the Tracks, Mixes, and Final Mix of a song. This is where I started my coding. Allowing VRS collaborators to upload, categorize and manage Tracks and Mixes was important to me because I wanted VRS to encourage making music by making the process of managing Tracks and Mixes simple and fun. And I wanted VRS to give collaborators all the information they needed to make online collaboration work.

I can personally attest to the frustration that a collaborator can have when they create a great track, and the mixer cannot get that track to sit right in the mix. I am, after all, a musician first and a coder second.

That is why both the Track and Mix upload have so many options. When uploading Tracks and Mixes collaborators can enter the time offset, the type/format of the file, the bit depth and sample rate, and a description of the Track/Mix. This information is critical for collaborators that might never actually talk to each other.

With this information, a mixer can properly import the track into their mixing software and align it.

I also felt it was important to overcome the limitations of FTP servers, which many Internet collaborators still use. The main objection I have is that FTP servers do not automatically assign permissions based on your role in a music project. So I set the following rules:

1. If you are a Producer, you can upload Tracks, Mixes, and the Final Mix. You can also delete ANY Track, Mix or Final. Yours, and everyone else's.
2. If you are a Mixer, you can upload Tracks and Mixes, but you can only delete YOUR Tracks and Mixes.
3. If you are a Musician, you can only upload Tracks, and you can only delete YOUR Tracks.

In this way, VRS keeps Tracks and Mixes from any accidental deletion or overwriting. This is one of the coolest features of VRS.

Repeat

But there was more I could do. And frankly, there is still more I can do to make collaborating on music projects more fun, and more effective.

One of the things that I added was voting. In a music project you might have two different guitar players submit a lead track. Both may be very good. By implementing a voting system, the collaborators can vote on each track, and determine which lead track the collaborators as a whole like better. Voting is currently anonymous, to avoid conflict. The producer can still do whatever he chooses, but having a consensus is a pretty powerful tool.

I also decided to allow the Final Mix to be published to a public portion of TheNetStudio.com. Only a Producer can upload a Final Mix. It is, after all, their decision when the project is complete. If the producer chooses to make the Final Mix public it will be given the following URL:

http://TheNetStudio.com/Public/<The Producers UserId>/<The Song Name>.<Song Type>

So for instance if I had a project called "Hit_Song" and I uploaded a Final Mix of an MP3. The URL would be:

http://TheNetStudio.com/Public/TheNetStudio/Hit_Song.mp3

You can upload your final mixes to another web site if you like, but we allow linking to this location to promote your final mixes if you want to. It's up to you.

As I said earlier, there is still so much more we can do, and we are exploring more ways to take advantage of Internet technologies like social networking to make VRS music collaboration even better.