Hacker News

Let's make it modern again, just write a blog post on <famous-company> tech blog

For a realtime-ish solution I wonder if you've seen Ninjam[1]? It used to be that most evenings one could find various populated rooms; the serverlist[2] shows that the infrastructure's all sat there ready for people to come.

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.

[1] https://www.cockos.com/ninjam/

[2] http://autosong.ninjam.com/server-list.php

Have a look at https://opendaw.org/

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

Apple will certainly jump on this. They already have GarageBand and they are making the hardware more accessible in the form of the Neo MacBooks. They are good at capitalizing on that FOMO power. And by making it a part of GarageBand (which already makes use of iCloud), they can keep it in their ecosystem. Collaboration is already doable with shared files, but I’m sure they can streamline the process

Edit: and another comment alerted me to the existence of live jam sessions, so this would be a possible extension of it

I’m working on something close to that. At the moment it’s just for ableton. The idea is to be able to sync a daw project, binaries will be saved on cloudflare and then use git for certain cases where it’s possible to merge. In case one person is working on a bass line and another is working on a guitar part. I’ve been using git for this workflow but the idea to have use interface that’s legible for non git users

Bandlab Studio, maybe? Never used it, but might be what you're looking for. There's a web version and a mobile app.

https://www.bandlab.com/creation-features

If that's just "turn-based collaboration" use the same DAW and a shared Drive/Dropbox/Whatever.

As a side note, is there any online community where you find people willing to do this? I’ve always struggled most with finding people eager to play and create music, especially as I get older. What you describe sounds like fun.

While not exactly the hub style you mentioned, maybe this is as close to Jamming you can get.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/guide/garageband-ipad/chsf2f...

I think that's what Soloist[1] is trying to do (unaffiliated, but I've met the founder)

[1]: https://www.soloistapp.com/

Out of all web-based apps I've tried, audiotool matches your description the closest.

Yes. I’ve wanted something like this for a while. I’ve always wondered why there isn’t version control for DAWs. So many times I’ve spent hours editing a track and accidentally saved it without specifying a unique file name. Only to open it later and wish I could go back to before the changes that fucked it up.

Idk if the GitHub analogy really works for music.

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.

Yes if you’re collaborating with 10 people in the same project, otherwise non sense.

That reminds me of what Splice used to do

Could be pretty easy to do with atproto accounts. Users could save/share their music as a tangled.sh repo and other people could contribute or fork as they please. A nice UI could hide all of that and make it fun to collaborate on music.

Too bad I'm lazy. RiffHub looks neat.

Ahh THAT's what it was reminding me of. Thanks! CEP2 was great indeed.

Try Ocenaudio - I’ve used pretty much every audio editor free and paid for and this is my go to for a free editor.

I also cannot understand why anyone would recommend Audacity.

when have you last tried audacity? it's been getting friendlier

Have you tried Ardour? It's like a superset of Audacity.

you can click and drag to select part of the audio (and then drag the edges of the selection region that has appeared if you want to adjust it), and then apply the effect. All effects prioritize the current selection first, and if no selection is present then get applied on the entire track.

Thank you :) I 'll look into it, I am a little cautious of bloating up the filesize (right now it's at 98kb of js and 10kb of css), but if I can make something work efficiently I 'll give it a go.

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...

I just tried it with a 2 hour podcast file, since more people asked about long files. It is performs great on chrome on my pretty powerful macbook. Some operations are a little slow and zooming in to max level starts to be slow, default things like cut/paste, apply fade effect and volume controls to areas of the file feel ok.

This is awesome. Congratulations!

As others on this thread have commented, you haven't specified a license. Don't jump on the first thing you think of. Consider the various OSS licenses and decide which one suits you best.

does it have to be dark mode?

Thanks for your comment :) you can press "preview" (and there is a little on/off) in the effect's modal window. But I agree with you, an automation type system that operates on the entire track might be better

I'm surprised no one has noticed this yet.

Doesn't seem to support midi currently unfortunately. I was hoping for the same.

It's the audio track in a channel. A channel is the horizontal strip, a waveform box is a piece of audio somewhere across that strip. You can double click on one to enter single editor mode, or single click to make it active (once it's active you can drag it around, apply effects to it, move it on a different channel etc etc).

Sorry still working on improving the UX :)

EDIT: There's a short video here - https://x.com/pkalogiros/status/2053492761350046032

There is a little [ + ] button next to CHANNELS in the sidebar, it has no limit but right now so add as many as you like :)

It's using dom to render the multitrack waveform boxes currently so I would assume after a certain point it might start to slow down a bit. In the future might switch it all to be webgpu based to avoid such limits.

I usually use it to edit audio tracks quickly up to 10 minutes long, though I have received nice emails from people who have used for 1hr+ podcasts successfully (though certain heavy operations wouldn't be very fun to use).

For multitrack sessions, there is the ability to export to a .amss file that contains all the settings, markers, tracks etc. For single track edit... it would just crash right now. There is already a feature for caching audio tracks in indexeddb (it's under >File), but honestly it's not a web api I have found to be super reliable. I don't blame the browser developers, because I 'm sure if it was more reliable certain websites would put it to use storing gigabytes of trackers on the user's machine :). For this reason, I haven't made it auto-save the session automatically yet, trying to be a good citizen on the user's computer, maybe that will change in the future if there's a strong need for it.

Also, right now there is no backend, once it loads there are no more requests made to the server, so it's bound to frontend limitations. This is by design, I want it to be an app that respects users, doesn't upload or leak information, no ads, etc, even if it means getting a small hit in functionality in other areas.

I think of it like photopea/pixlr are to photoshop. Quick and easy to use, get you at 90% of the way. If somebody wants to do a serious operation, then by all means go for a paid desktop pro-daw solution :)

edit: reason

> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23337091

Strongly disagree. Looks coded with love and fingers.