What if you could record directly online from a Web browser – no additional software needed? It’s not a new idea, but online music community Indaba has an interesting new Java-based tool that gets one step closer. We took a first look at the tool last month, but it’s now publicly available at indabamusic.com today. Indaba shared with CDM some video walking us through the feature set, and the company founders also answered some of my questions. For the musicians in the audience, we’ll have some more hands-on time with this tool to see if it’s something you can use. (My guess is, it’s something you might use alongside your existing tool of choice.) For the developers and Java fans (or skeptics), I also want to dig a little deeper in the Java and JavaFX platforms behind the scenes.

What can you do when making music in a browser?

• Work online or offline.
• Record directly online and share immediately.
• Work across platforms, directly in the browser.
• Add real-time effects, mixing, and even multitrack automation for adjusting levels.

Indaba isn’t alone in some of these features, but the ability to have high-performance, non-destructive audio effects and to record directly into the program without the typical browser restraints is definitely a step forward from other solutions.

Pricing will include a relatively full-featured free plan, plus $5/mo and $25/mo tiers adding additional clips, online storage workspace, and real-time non-destructive effects. (Video sharing service Vimeo recently adjusted their free/Pro distinction, a subject Jaymis covered for Create Digital Motion yesterday.)

Here’s our own Q&A to get things rolling:

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.

Java may not be on the radar of the average Mac user, but to the Java development community, Leopard has been a bombshell. Apple’s been slow with Java releases before, but something’s different this time: there’s been almost no information on the topic, and Apple has even pulled an existing Java 6 development build (released for Linux, Windows, Solaris, and every OS on Earth late last year). While Java and Apple apologists alike bend over to explain why this doesn’t matter / isn’t really an issue, we received an interesting comment here on CDMusic that suggests something big has happened they’ve all missed. This tipster argues Apple has all but eliminated its Java development team, and future development may (finally) fall to Sun. From our comments:

i had a long chat with a sun engineer over tea today where this issue came up as well. he was basically saying:

• apple has moved all developers from the java team to the ical team except for one poor bloke who is mainly working on a stable java 1.5 version
• the guy doing the actual 1.6 port left apple, apparently finishing the port is just a piece of cake, could be done in a few days but for legal reasons he cant do it anymore.
• apple will most likely never release an opensource version of their vm because it is a big dirty mess using various old frameworks all tied together in spaghetti code/ secondly it seems to require sourcecode access to the mac os x standard frameworks sources e.g. coreservices etc.
• some people at the java fx team at sun have started making their own java 1.7 runtime for os x which hints that eventually sun might take java for mac back under its control
• speaking of sound and other java things missing in osx – the answer is: wait for java fx! its very promising, you’ll be surprised.

Why this sort of rumor may be wrong: Note that it’s not clear how much of this is an accurate picture. Java isn’t dead in Leopard — on the contrary, Java 5 has been updated for the new OS, even if Java 6 is missing. And there are still developers at Apple working on Java, as they regularly appear on the java-dev list — and there’s more than one person. Even among Java developers frustrated with Apple’s progress, it’s clear that those engineers do a terrific job — though they may need more resources, and it is unclear whether it’s still advantageous for Apple to be maintaining Java in place of Sun in the first place.

Java everywhere, media everywhere: Why bother putting this on a site called Create Digital Music, and not, you know, Create Digital Java Applications? Because Java is a key, cross-platform development platform for music and multimedia, in the form of tools like the open-source coding-for-artists platform Processing, and a significant amount of media research. The alternative is generally less-elegant, more time-intensive C and C++ code; Ruby, C#, Python, and others haven’t really proven themselves for multimedia applications.