Mapping musicians

I like maps. They used to be fairly crap on-line until Google came along and showed everyone how it should be done. Not only that, but they made it easy for people to build apps on top of the map. Years ago there was a site called Frappr that let any group of people put pins on a map to show where they all were. This is useful for any on-line community to make it easier for people to meet up in the flesh. That site is long gone.

Recently I found Musomap that does something similar, but it aimed at musicians who want to find local people to collaborate with. It's still fairly small, with just over 1000 members. That means many areas are still sparsely populated. The site features messaging and chat facilities. I used the latter to chat to the site creator 'Kahne'. He's eager to talk to people about how they want the site to develop and I have said I am happy to help where I can. I've already persuaded a few people to join, including several members of the Six String Bliss community.



A site with similar aims is Fandalism, but that doesn't do maps. That really went viral and now has around 500,000 users. I assume that people are getting something out of it, but I haven't so far. It would be great to see Musomap take off in a similar way, but I don't know what it will take and if it can cope with that many people. Scaling is tricky and can cause a flood of updates that will overwhelm people unless they can filter it.

I'm still on various other 'muso wanted' sites as well. I spoke to someone a while back about a blues band, but nothing has come of it yet. I'm keeping my options open. My little pub acoustic jam session has started up again after a summer break. There were four of us there this week, including a bassist. I also have another Six String Bliss album project to work on. I need to start planning that.

Oh, and just last night I did a quick recording of a cool Paul Gilbert guitar lesson. It's a very rough recording, but it captures what I was doing. I didn't quite get the riff right, but that makes it my own thing!

A Collaborative DAW?

In these days of high speed internet many tasks that previously needed people to get together in one place can be done on-line. That saves time and money, but also makes possible collaborations that would have been impossible before. Since I joined the Six String Bliss guitar community I've participated in a couple of collaborative songs where participants were distributed all over the world and had mostly never actually met each other. These were done by sharing backing tracks using Dropbox that we would load into our local DAW and then send back an export of our own tracks for a nominated producer to mix.

I did the vocals on this with 8 or 9 others doing various tracks.


I was thinking that the tools could make this a smoother process. I'd be surprised if something similar to what I'm thinking of doesn't already exist. I'm thinking that the 'producer' would do the backing tracks as before, but could select an option to share a mix with other participants. That would then automatically appear in their DAW project as a track without manual export and import. They would send their tracks back by the same method. It would be something like a shared Dropbox folder where you all get any files placed there, but would need some tweaks so you just get the final version when it is ready. The files involved will be fairly large, but shouldn't take more than minutes to transfer in general.

A further level would be the ability for others to monitor the tracking as it happened so they can offer suggestions. Actually playing together 'live' over the internet has issues due to the inherent latency (see below), but we're all merrily doing near real-time audio these days via Skype and other services in very reasonable quality.

Ohm Studio offers most of these features, but is not available on Linux. It looks like they anticipated my thoughts. The MIDI should work well as the files are pretty small. It looks like a smooth experience.

It would be cool to see this sort of thing implemented within Ardour.

Another type of collaboration is the jam session. As mentioned above it's hard to get low latency due to the nature of the internet and the limits of the speed of light. Ninjam has been around for years and gets around this by using looped backing and not sharing a player's audio until the loop ends. I've tried it briefly by running Reaper on Wine, but didn't fully get the hang of it.

The standalone Ninjam client hasn't  been updated in a few years, but I just found a project called Wahjam that has taken the code and seems to be in active development.

I also came across ejamming that seems to have found ways around the latency issue. It's also not on Linux,but looks like clever stuff.