Speaking of games, you can expect game production to start to attract the attention of musicians and web publishers. Whereas a few short years ago, targeting musicians might mean dangling rock club gigs or album sales, now a lot of those same music makers want to break into gaming, too.

Kongregate is a bit like public access, only on steroids and for games. The idea is this: get indie game makers in one place contributing games, then get lots of people playing those games, then support the system with ad revenue shared with the game makers. The model has grown rapidly, with millions of users and over 15,000 original games.

The newest project from Kongregate looks to connect artistic talent on projects, including musicians, composers, and sound designers wanting to work on game projects. The Collabs section will see artists and sound and music creators uploading their work to find collaborators. Initially, there’s a contest on, with competition for attention, cash, and studio prizes.

http://www.kongregate.com/collabs

The competition aside, this could be the beginning of a successful community for collaboration in the indie Flash gaming world. Assets are often uploaded under a Creative Commons license, and I see one of the top sounds draws on samples from Freesound.org. While career success is an obvious goal, the contributors so far appear to see sharing as a way to get there – in stark contrast to the model in the mainstream, big-business game industry. Quality is, of course, variable, but ask anyone in the game industry how to become successful and the answer is always make as much as you can. Getting work out there, even primitive, can be part of a learning process. So I’m eager to see what transpires as these kinds of communities grow.

There is an invariable comparison to Deviant Art – and you’ll see they’ve already begun to invade.

Oh yeah, and I quite like these glassy tendrils, rendered in Cinema 4D. Image (CC) Chaodeath. Now, make that run real-time. Or, erm, imagine those are virtual renderings of artists … collaborating.

Indaba Music, a community and suite of online tools for musicians, announced today they’ve revamped their online recording and production tool using Java and JavaFX. The result: a platform-agnostic, online interface that allows you to record music “directly to the Internet.” And the band Weezer is excited enough about it that they’re giving their official endorsement.

Indaba, along with some others, already had an online music production tool. The new version expands on that idea, allowing you to record audio signal directly online, and beefing up tools for mixing, editing, and looping. Just like tools like GarageBand, a pre-built set of loops is ready for people to quickly mock up songs.

With some help from Sun’s JavaFX technology, the browser/desktop barrier isn’t as noticeable. You get a graphical-looking interface that works the same anywhere, plus the ability to drag audio files to and from your desktop.

indabamusic.com

javafx.com

Interestingly, Weezer’s endorsement focuses on the fact that they don’t know how to use other music software. I have to admit some skepticism here – a lot of musicians I think are savvy enough to get to use creative new music software, and a lot of the basic functions of the Indaba software itself are straight out of tools like ACID and GarageBand. Nor do you have to worry about any JavaFX tool blowing away your REAPER, Logic, Live, Pro Tools… well, you know.

On the other hand, while this is basically just an ACID-style audio production station in the browser, I’m curious about what new applications might take advantage of in-browser collaboration that don’t look like existing audio tools. Maybe we’ll have specialized tools for working out specific ideas or sharing snippets in-progress. And there’s no question that building some tools in the browser makes sharing more immediate.

I’ll be talking to the Indaba folks and the JavaFX team a little bit about the technology, and with Sun in particular I’ll be sure to ask about some of the future potential here for other tools. If you have questions, let me know.

Assuming you haven’t already hit Ableton overload with all the news announced this week, Ableton has posted a set of videos that do a pretty nice job of demonstrating the features. I’ve assembled them into a playlist here. (Stumbled on these videos thanks to Synthtopia.)

There are four videos in the playlist, covering Live 8, APC, Max for Live, and Share.

In particular, one video shows how the Share collaboration feature will work, with the ability to easily upload sets and share them either publicly or privately. (There’s a long introduction, but skip halfway through and it starts to talk about the actual solution.)

To me, the big question there is how much it’ll cost. It is nice to see an embeddable widget. Even better would be to have an open API – any chance of that, Ableton? That’d allow web developers (cough) hook into these features for other tools. Imagine if SoundCloud, for instance, which offers audio sharing and commenting, could also link more easily to projects uploaded for Live. Now, Ableton could keep control over Share and work with SoundCloud individually, but then they might miss Bandcamp or some other service they didn’t see coming — you get the idea.

Note that Live isn’t the first to ponder online sharing features, either. FL Studio has its own Collab feature, which nicely enough offers its own chat client – something I wrote about for Keyboard Magazine. I can imagine a world in which the Live Share option is just one of a number of similar features — making an open API all the more interesting. (I can’t actually find that Keyboard article, but I know I wrote it!)

More on Ableton at NAMM here on CDM:

Akai APC40 Video from Ableton; More Controllers Coming

Ableton’s Upgrade Options: Easier to Understand than a Large Hadron Collider

Ableton Live 8, Now with Grooves: The Top 8 New Features

What Makes the APC40 Special: Interactive Clip, Device Control, Dedicated Buttons

Ableton: You’ll Be Able to Customize Akai’s APC40 Using Max for Live

Akai APC40 Ableton Live Controller, in Detail: Plug-and-Play Live Control For Everyone?

Updated: It seems that Collab is no more?

And Key of Grey has a nice story wondering about alternatives to this kind of integrated tool:

Collaborating on a music project online

Every time you turn around, someone else is holding some sort of promotional music contest. But this week, we have not one but three contests I think will really appeal to CDM readers — and I’m especially eager to hear what results you might submit.

Guitar Rig Hero is a huge contest with some big prizes. Native Instruments notes that users were already, without prompting, posting Guitar Rig videos to YouTube. So, they’ve put together a jury to properly judge the best possible contributions, with jurors including the likes of the Deftones, Dweezil Zappa (yes, the offspring of Frank Zappa), and (one of my personal favorites) Mogwai. Prizes: a quad-core Fujitsu-Siemens laptop, NI software, and (non-software) guitars from Gibson.

NI says participants are “asked to capture a video of their most original and spectacular performance using GUITAR RIG 3, without any sonic or artistic limitations applying.” What’s interesting is that not all the entries are using guitars — there’s already an interesting experimental entry with violin and Guitar Rig, and I suspect if we unleash some of the CDM community on this contest, there will be more.

You don’t have to own Guitar Rig 3 to participate; the demo version will work (and then you can try to, you know, win the full version). The contest ends September 30.

I’ve run synths, keyboards, and even sitar through Guitar Rig, so I’m interested to hear what other not-guitars you can come up with.

Guitar Rig Hero Contest Page @ NI

Guitar Rig Contest YouTube Channel (with various videos up already)

Matthew Dear, performing as Audion, is coming to Minitek in New York this weekend, and we know from reader feedback that you’d like us to talk to him. (Yes, some of the endless minimal entries in Minitek, true to the festival’s name, start to blur together, but Matthew to me is someone really musically special.)

As it happens, among Beatport’s regular contests, there’s an Audion remix contest for “Billy Says Go.” Downloads started this week, and you can submit through the end of the month. This is public voting as opposed to juried voting, but since I know there are some Audion fans out there, let us know if you do something nice. Prizes: Traktor Scratch, $100 Beatport gift card, and a grab bag of Beatport swag. Those of you trash talking Richie Hawtin, maybe this is your chance to show us your skills.

Audion Remix Competition @ Beatportal

Sonoma’s RiffWorks software and accompanying community is apparently popular among readers here, so it seems worth passing this along. The RiffWorks site is awarding RiffWorld.com community members IK Multimedia software and other downloads and goodies. That in itself isn’t that interesting, but what is a bit different about this particular competition is that you can collaborate on entries; if you decide not to go solo, you can invite up to three other people to work with you. I still prefer collaborating in person rather than online, but I’ll be interested to hear how collaboration is working out for people. (Naturally, the reason they’re emphasizing this is to promote the collaboration features of the site — but you’re the best judge of how that works.)

RiffRumble 12

Seriously, do let us know if you choose to participate in these contests, or if there are other online communities you’re working on; we’d love to know. I imagine running this means a dozen PR folks will be breathing down my neck tomorrow with other contests, but these do seem up the CDM alley and … well, for the rest, that’s what the “mute conversation” feature in Gmail is for. Enjoy!

Even with the success of beginner-targeted software like GarageBand, computer music production is still something a lot of musicians have only started to explore. And while there are computer-savvy players of every instrument, there’s no question guitars are underrepresented for the size of the market versus, say, keyboards.

Sonoma’s RiffWorks has been one software entry trying to change that, by combining guitar-centric features (amps and effects) with loops, multi-track recording, and collaboration features. As with GarageBand and Steinberg’s Sequel, loops, machines, and effects assist in quick song creation. But unlike those products, Sonoma also emphasizes collaboration, and is targeted directly at guitarists.

Now, they’ve introduced a free version of the software called RiffWorks T4. While it’s free, it does quite a lot – presumably to try to get hooked on online collaboration on song making.

• 4-layer song production
• Basic effects (Wah, Multi-band Compression & Distortion, Modulation, Delay, Reverb, Compression, and British Style EQ), plus IK Multimedia’s AmpliTube LE guitar amp/effects and Gallo Engineering’s Studio Devil BVC amp model
• An “InstantDrummer” drum machine/accompaniment tool with intensity, variation
• Online collaboration and online song sharing community

Online collaboration has always been a challenge because the physical size of the planet Earth actually means that true real-time collaboration is basically impossible with music. The solution is simply to provide music that’s synced, if not in real-time. Sonoma describes their solution: “As a track is recorded, it streams to other players and is perfectly in sync.” (In other words, it’s better to be a bar behind but in sync than a fraction of a second off.)  [Update] To clarify: unlike many online music collaboration services, you can work simultaneously on a song recording – see reader discussion in comments. This is a step behind eSession-style near-real-time collaboration, in that you hear full riffs at once. (eSession is synced to a metronome, though it can’t do “true” real-time, either, in the sense that you can on a local computer.) It is a number of steps ahead of most other online tools, however – and the real draw is the software editing and effects anyway, as combined with these community features.

That said, I think online collaboration could be fun, if Sonoma can get a healthy community going. Many musicians still prefer in-person collaboration for other (non-technical) reasons. But then, the two aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive, especially in our online-connected world. Sonoma tells CDM that over 1,000 people per day are signing up; now it just remains – as with other communities – to see how many get really involved.

Even if the online side doesn’t take off, perhaps the production tools will. Guitarists, if you do give this a try – or if you’re already a user of RiffWorks – we’d love to hear from you.

RiffWorks T4 [Free software, Mac, Windows]