Show HN: Soundkeep (Github for music)

http://alpha.soundkeep.com

by joshontheweb • 14 years ago

44 29 14 years ago

alpha.soundkeep.com

joshontheweb12• 14 years ago

The app is still in alpha and pretty rudimentary but we wanted to get some early feedback from the HN community. If you are a musician, does this concept appeal to you? What would you do differently?

veridies2• 14 years ago

It's a really cool idea and I'd love to use it myself. I would prefer lossless tracks (all the examples I see are lossy MP3 or OGG), but that's a pretty small issue. Time-stamped comments, like in SoundCloud, would be pretty cool. And I can't figure out an easy way to see people's public remixes of a song.

The biggest problem I see is that you can't apply any effects to the master bus (since, of course, each component track is played separately). I don't see a good way to fix that. You might be able to do it by offering some VSTs for download, allowing people to engineer the mix to sound right on their own, and having a way to apply the same effects on the website. That's a really difficult one, though.

To combine different projects, some form of excerpting / tracker would be great. If I could select a fifteen second clip, loop that for a while against another person's song, I could do a lot with that without ever leaving your web page.

And even more importantly: time-stretching. I won't be able to merge tracks into other projects without leaving the page if the tracks don't line up in BPM. There should be a way to change that.

Seriously though, I really like this interface and I'd love to see it develop. A few musician sponsors and this could be huge. The best of luck to you.

joshontheweb12• 14 years ago

Thanks for the great feedback.

We actually do allow you to upload in wav, aiff, flac but you can only download in those formats if the tracks were uploaded in the same.

Using the WebAudio API we should be able to apply effects to the master bus. This is our first test of the concept and it expects that you will do most of the work in your DAW using the site for sharing. In future versions we want to add more in browser editing if we get enough requests for it. Thanks for all the suggestions!

brunoc• 14 years ago

Thanks for sharing this.

I'm a musician and while I think the idea is great, I think the mechanics in the demo are too limiting for most remixing work. Typically if I'm working on a remix I would change the tempo, change the song structure, etc. which doesn't really work well with the 'versions of the original stems' metaphor that is used in the application.

Then again it may be interesting to see how people get around those issues to get the results they want. Often times having limitations boosts creativity rather than hinder it.

manicho2• 14 years ago

I don't mean to hijack this thread, but here's my side project that allows you to do some of those things. It's also in testing stages, but feel free to check it out. Here's part of a Girl talk mashup I created with it. http://www.mashandmix.com/Home?PlayMix=20 Another one: http://www.mashandmix.com/Home?PlayMix=19

vangale• 14 years ago

It looks like you're competing with ccmixter.org, loophunter, etc. but you're still very early stage. There's no licensing information or organization/categorization (which seems kind of critical for service like this).

joshontheweb12• 14 years ago

Yes, we should be more clear about this point. Everything on soundkeep is released through creative commons. We want our differentiating factor to be the idea of people remixing each other and creating derivative work. We'll be adding categorization soon. Don't have enough content to really warrant it right now.

mehulkar• 14 years ago

increase the dynos!

yuletide666• 14 years ago

this.

joshontheweb12• 14 years ago

Working on it. Sorry if you got timed out :/

manicho2• 14 years ago

I like the idea and in fact I have a side project that's somewhat similar. I've been in the same boat where I thought music remixing and producing should be more collaborative and a sharing process and chromes web audio api seems to be a great tool for that.

Will your site eventually allow you to download a final mastered .mp3 or .ogg file? Do you have plans to do more audio editing in the browser as opposed to just layering one track on top of another?

joshontheweb12• 14 years ago

Thanks manchiko, we'll be adding the ability to download the mastered track soon. We will likely be adding in extra editing features or even midi editing but we'd like to see what kind of requests we get first.

lukifer3• 14 years ago

I know it's non-trivial, but I think one-click effects would be amazing as well (reverb, chorus, distortion, etc). Think audio Instagram.

lukifer3• 14 years ago

This is exactly what I hoped it would be based on the title. Nice job, looking forward to seeing it grow!

Have you reached out to Trent Reznor? He's been a big leader in open-sourcing his music and actively encouraging his fans to remix. I suspect Beck would be interested as well; he recently released an album exclusively in the form of sheet music.

joshontheweb12• 14 years ago

Thanks, We'd obviously love to work with both of them. I think we want to get the community built up a little more and work all the bugs out before we start doing that kind of outreach.

heynk• 14 years ago

Very cool. I clicked around a bit and then watched the video which I found to be very informative after you started playing with 'In Motion // Josh'. I wanted to play with that track as well so I immediately started looking for it, but since it's not on the home page I couldn't find it. Can you post the link?

Since you only have 84 projects, why not either put them all on the home page (although its already laggy) or paginate? It seems that you're already showing 66 projects on the front page as is.

joshontheweb12• 14 years ago

Good point. We should get that track on the live site. I'll let you know when we get it posted. Our project count includes all projects. Sometimes people remix a project but then never modify it. We screen this out of the Hot Projects feed. Thanks for checking it out.

RK2• 14 years ago

Excuse my ignorance, but is there an equivalent to git for digital music production?

joshontheweb12• 14 years ago

No, music offers a whole different set problems for version control. Getting a traditional text diff on binary files doesn't do the user much good. We plan on adding support for Midi soon and that will make it possible to be more granular.

RK2• 14 years ago

That makes sense. It seems like you would need some non-binary meta information about the wave forms, etc, that I'm sure would not be supported across audio-editors.

yesimahuman• 14 years ago

Hey Josh, congrats on launching! Unfortunately, it seems down for me.

Anyways, we met last month down in San Antonio. Let's stay in touch man and good luck!

joshontheweb12• 14 years ago

Thanks. Sorry, our proxy server was choking for some reason :/ Good to hear from you, Max.

graue• 14 years ago

Looks really cool. Unfortunately the play buttons do nothing. I'm assuming this is because the files are mp3, and I'm on Ubuntu, which doesn't support mp3s in <audio> tags in either Firefox or Chromium :( But maybe you could use MP3.js to add support? https://github.com/devongovett/mp3.js

Edit: Also, even without that, it would be nice if this detected lack of MP3 support and produced a message of some kind instead of the play buttons simply doing nothing.

Second edit: Yeah, this actually looks totally awesome. I hate that I'm missing out.

joshontheweb12• 14 years ago

Sorry it isn't working. You are correct, it is the problem is the mp3 support. Getting the audio to play cross browser hasn't been trivial. We'll look into mp3.js.

csense• 14 years ago

Great concept! Here are some random ideas:

1. You should be able to attach metadata such as beats-per-minute or key signature to each track, so it's easier to make remixes of tracks from different songs.

2. It would also be great if you had support for formats which include per-note data like MIDI, Lilypond [1], and MOD/XM/IT. Bonus points for built-in scrolling sheet music and/or Synthesia view [2].

3. If you have an MP3 of each track, then mix them together to create another MP3 of the final song, your data is going through the lossy MP3 encoding step twice. Maybe you should have an option to store music in FLAC; perhaps a perk only available to premium users (since it takes more resources).

4. Content creators really want to find music to use in Youtube videos, phone apps, games, whatever. People who upload songs to this should really have a way to include license information. Bonus points if there's a search or RSS feed for music by license type.

5. You should be aware of DMCA compliance. If this app becomes successful, I have no doubt that people will try to upload copyrighted songs, and you'd better have a plan for dealing with takedown requests.

[1] http://www.lilypond.org/

[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NuzP067_gZs

Show HN: Soundkeep (Github for music)

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