Working together on music

What is the joint work of musicians on the project in the modern world? Like this :



- A computer, sometimes a MIDI keyboard, specialized software (for example, Propellerhead Reason) and a bit of discussion.
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Remote work is somewhat more complicated. As a rule, the discussion consists of the following steps:

1. in some editor a musical sketch is made and saved to a file
2. file is sent to the second participant via Skype, email, DropBox or other file sharing chat
3. the sketch opens in the exact same editor of the exact same version, is corrected and sent back
4. repeat to final version

Immediately obvious problems of this method of exchange

1. all participants must have absolutely identical software installed, otherwise it will not work to edit files. And the use of the standard .mid is unsuitable because the sound will be different due to different sound banks.
2. saving to a project file is not always a trivial task. For example, Pro Tools for the purpose of the exchange saves the entire session to the huge archive along with the settings connected to the plug-ins and samples.

What should be the perfect collaboration service

PowerFX Soundation , Kompoz , Audiotool , Propellerhead Discover , other solutions from this niche have a million audience. However, they all do not fully support a set of simple features:
- everything should work on-line without installing additional software and without Flash
- work on mobile devices is obligatory, which means that the interface of the built-in editor should be adapted for small screens and finger input
- the publication and opening of musical fragments should be carried out in one click without rewriting files, etc.
- import / export to common formats (at least .mid) is required

Implementation

We tried to implement all of the above requirements in our service. Test the service here :


- as you can see, everything opens in one click, the sound quality is quite sufficient for the set goals. Links are opened from any blog / forum (in this case Reddit) without registration.

Technical details

Browser support Web Audio API has made possible the implementation of full-fledged wave synthesis.
Most modern phones have enough power to draw on the canvas in the html-page of tens and hundreds of notes without visible lags.

Of course there is a fly in the ointment
- Internet Explorer does not support Web Audio (but Microsoft announced support for the new version).
- The Web Audio standard is changing more often than we would like, for example, the createScriptProcessor method has already been declared obsolete and it is proposed to use createAudioWorker instead.

In the following articles we will describe in more detail about the tools and solutions used.