I'm the lead author of Ardour, a cross-platform open source DAW. Just last night, I was helping out a user who was having issues (eventually traced to their AMD graphics stack). Their session wasn't particularly large - about 1 hour of recorded spoken word and some backing music. The whole data set came to 6.5GB ... non-trivial for "cloud-based" anything, even today.
Yes, there are ways to be clever about this stuff, but for "real music making" the typical size of the data involved makes cloud-based collaboration less immediately appealling than you might imagine.
Agreed, data volumes are definitely the biggest hurdle in this scenario. Any of the cloud DAWs I've seen mostly offer basic features, and a handful of recording tracks at best.
Just checked out Ardour, looks great! Being able to work with videos and (I presume) work on additional audio and eventually mix the two audio sources back into the video is a fantastic feature.
Yes, there are ways to be clever about this stuff, but for "real music making" the typical size of the data involved makes cloud-based collaboration less immediately appealling than you might imagine.