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?
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.
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!
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.
This is pretty cool. At some point we release an API for all of Soundkeeps creative commons samples/tracks. It would be a good combination with tools like yours.
