Yesterday, we saw a bit of the idea of making mobile gadgets more sociable with each other. The idea is, through network/wireless and cabled connectivity, you extend possibilities for expression, control, and collaboration with yourself and others. It’s the same thing that makes a recording studio useful: tools work together to let people work together to create music. It’s absolutely not a new idea; the engineering question is just making it work well on new platforms.

On iOS, we’re already seeing some of this: apart from MIDI connectivity, developer like KORG have even tried using wireless features intended largely for multiplayer gaming to connect multiple beatboxes and synths over a network.

Continuing a look at the Android side of things, Andrea Belloni sends an open source project that gets a sequencer working over a network with a computer and Arduino-based hardware project. It’s really a proof of concept – let’s call it a hack of concept – so they say specifically they weren’t concerned with making it pretty. It’s at an earlier stage of the process, but it’s nice to see that. The basic idea is to control the hardware sequencer, built on Arduino, with a Processing sketch running on the phone, all over a WiFi network. Take the same basic idea and streamline the hardware a bit (the Arduino and shield get a bit clunky), and this could actually be practical.

Android Arduino Sequencer [Italian + English]

But I think as an illustration of what I was saying in words yesterday, it’s worth covering this just so I have an excuse to use this picture:

Yep, that’s the idea. Add in some other operating systems to that graph, too, if you like!

Surprise! Plug-in developer Ohm Force, known for their plug-ins (like effects Ohm Boys and Frohmage), today tease an upcoming collaborative host. It looks like the sort of thing Apple could have done, but hasn’t. There’s a GarageBand-style MIDI and audio editing pane, plus semi-modular routing of plug-ins on a pretty, graphical surface that resembles the “cheese grater” perforated aluminum of a Mac tower, and pop-up window palettes that resemble those we’ve seen on the “flattened UI” of the iPad.

The real feature here, though, is collaborative editing in the “cloud”: sessions are uploaded to a server, which in turn keeps track of versioning. (Actually, it’s quite unclear how that works collaboratively – this means you can “undo” from one version to another, but I can’t tell whether collaborators can try different “forks,” or if it’s all one set of linear changes.) The changes are “real-time,” though usually the trick to allowing international collaboration over the Internet is to make things delayed enough that everyone stays in sync.

There’s also an accompanying Web community for connecting with collaborators. Everything else about the product, however – more features, pricing, and specifics of how it all fits together – is as yet unknown. Mac and Windows are both supported, though – something Apple would not have done, most likely.

It’s an interesting idea, one I think we’ll see more frequently as connected applications grow in popularity. Among other options, Ableton had promised something like this with Share and then fell off the radar. Image-Line had a collaborative tool called Collab for its FL Studio, then abandoned it. The most significant competition comes from tools like Indaba. Indaba’s edge: by being powered by Web tech, you can do all your editing right in the browser; serious users can then keep using their host of choice and just bounce out audio. But while Indaba has an offline editor, too, the addition of plug-ins in Ohm Studio is a big change.

I do wonder with all of this, though: are we consigned to collaboration existing only in proprietary, integrated app-website combinations? Isn’t the whole lesson of the Web about open standards and platform-agnostic communication? Having said that, what would a more open tool look like – and what do people really want to do? (For instance, I wonder how hard it’d be to build a system that allowed open chat and transport control, with standards-based versioning and sharing, using the open-source DAW Ardour? See the post I’m … about to write … for the OSC end of this.) On the other hand, is the kind of integration Ohm Studio is offering necessary to make it all work together? (That last question we should be able to answer once this is in our hands and ready to try.)

I don’t wish to pre-judge Ohm Studio – on the contrary, I think this is a provocative product teaser that immediately raises some of these fundamental questions. So bravo, Ohm, for starting that conversation; I can’t wait to see what you’ve cooked up. And anything that gets artists collaborating is potentially a very good thing.

In the meantime, readers, it seems the most important question falls to you. Do you even want to collaborate with other artists? What would an ideal system look like for doing so? What features would you want? How would you want to work? Is real-time important, or do you prefer some time to sit back and think about how elements combine? When you collaborate now, how do you go about it?

Updated: Your closest bet at the moment is NINJAM, which is integrated with Reaper – a host various folks are using already – or on its own. Using compressed audio streams and latency compensation, it allows the exchange of any audio, and it works on Windows and Mac. But it doesn’t exchange MIDI data. (The site refers vaguely to this happening some time in the future, but I’m unsure of their progress.) And it doesn’t have integration with the Web community, though as readers note, you may want to work with people you get to know a bit first, anyway. Thanks to “PooPoo the Korruptah!” for the tip. (Hmm, no way for me to say that and not sound silly.)

More importantly – anyone out there using it? Or is it just easier to send files back and forth?

http://ninjam.com/

Take a powerful game engine (for animation, 2D and 3D graphics, physics, and on-screen interaction). Add the flexibility of a visual development environment for programming with virtual patch cords, for rich sonic and musical capabilities plus easy interaction with data and input. That’s the idea of combining something like Unity 3D with Max/MSP. In the example from earlier today, the solution simply routed basic data from a Unity-based game to a responsive music engine in Max.

In the case of [myu] – the Max Unity Interoperability Toolkit – that integration goes further still. Developed at the DISIS (Digital Interactive Sound & Intermedia Studio) at Virginia Tech, [myu] allows bi-directional integration of the Unity engine with Max or Pd. The two tools use netsend/netreceive to send data via TCP and glue the two together.

For visualists using Jitter, you can even exchange texture data, which offers some mind-blowing powers for live visuals.

Download at Virginia Tech — bonus, an extension of the aka.wiiremote object so you can use the lovely Wii Fit controller, among various other projects
Discussion on the Unity Community Forums
Discussion on the Cycling ’74 forum
Virginia Tech DISIS

As an interactive prototyping tool, this should have a lot of potential for lovers of patch-style programming.

Thanks to Dr. Ivica Ico Bukvic, DISIS Director and researcher, for sending in his project. I’ll be curious to see what other people might do with this.

Okay, calling anything “Web 2.0″ is about as cool as casually slipping in the word “synergy.” Generally meaningless; definitely faux pas. But splicemusic.com was already tending that direction, with a website that allowed users to remix each other’s music live on the Web, and share and network with other community members in that process. Now, Splice itself has reached its own 2.0 release, and things are heating up fast. It’s not so much the typical Web community features that set it apart (blogging, becoming “fans” or friends of other users, bright, Web 2.0-y colors, and community-based ranking). Instead, it’s the fact that Splice can do things previously only possible in dedicated, offline software:

• Online arrangements: as before, remix and arrange tracks without leaving your Web browser
• Real-time effects — yep, you read that right. You can actually apply common effects like flanger, delay, and distortion via the Web interface.
• Online virtual instruments in the Web interface
• Store drafts online privately, until a track is finished
• Collect samples from around the site to use in your song

Splice

Real-time effects and instruments in a Web browser? That’s a surprise. Java has made that possible for some time, but it’s new to Flash, and even in Java actual implementations have been few — let alone integrated in a full-blown community site open to the public and ready to use.

Best of all, we hear that Bram de Jong, famed as the gifted plug-in developer in the Smartelectronix collective, engineered the new plug-in system. There’s even a Web version of his SupaTrigger plug-in. If you don’t know Bram’s work already, check out his cross-platform, donationware plugs:

Bram @ Smartelectronix

We’ll be talking to Splice more about what’s new, where it’s going, how it was developed, and what this means for music making on the Web; stay tuned.

In the meantime, I’ll say it again — don’t assume you’ll be throwing away your non-Web music software anytime soon. Web software is still extremely constrained in terms of access to the local file system and audio hardware inputs and outputs, for starters, meaning it’s actually technically impossible to have anywhere close to the feature set you get in offline apps. Furthermore, for high performance processing and low latency, audio apps actually have to get more intimate with the operating system than even typical desktop apps do, and require support for plug-in technologies and ASIO and Core Audio drivers … the list goes on. And that just about wraps it up for the browser.

Where there may be new opportunity is in “rich clients.” Unfortunately, systems like Adobe’s Apollo — now AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) are extremely limited in comparison to so-called “native” development tools. In fact, the closest you’re likely to get is Java, especially if a Java app adds some additional desktop integration for the OS-specific dirty work; Java’s own internal APIs are in a woeful state as far as multimedia.

But that’s not to take away from the importance — and surprise, rapid development — of tools like Splice. In fact, they demonstrate just how rich the experience can be when you add the Web. Future desktop music apps would do well to take a close look at these kinds of features.