Rate my startup: SolidComposer - version control for musicians
solidcomposer.com
solidcomposer.com
If I wanted a remote session player to do some overdubs on a track, I'd FTP over a rough mixdown or use Indaba. Dependency management is a really difficult task given the amount of proprietary software and hardware in use - the people likely to pay you money for this sort of thing are unlikely to be using many free plugins. If you've got a regular collaborator then you can sort out a common toolset, but that rather nullifies the point of dependency management. Ableton Share works acceptably well, but only because it's deeply integrated with Live. Image-Line dropped collaboration because they considered it more hassle than it's worth. If you reckon that it'll be less hassle for you or that you can extract more value then I wish you the best of luck, but I certainly don't see how.
The project I'm working on at the moment runs to 1.6GB and that's just a 4 minute pop song. A full day of recording a band can easily produce 30GB worth of data and that's at low bit rates. The good DAWs manage alternative takes rather well, certainly well enough that I'd be loath to tie up my broadband for two days after every session for version control.
To take you on your own mission statement, I have absolutely no idea how your product would make me better at making music, help me waste less time with my computer or make it more convenient to collaborate. Maybe I'm totally atypical, but I don't think so.
You want my opinion? Discard everything but collaboration and focus on Reason. It's a closed box, so no dependency problems. It doesn't do audio recording, so no massive files. It can natively bundle project samples into its file format, keeping things simple for the user. I don't like Reason, I don't like people who do like Reason, but it appears to be the only thing that'll do what you're looking to do without a long list of caveats and ballaches.
I generated 10 minutes of white noise and saved it as 320kbps mp3 and quality 10 ogg. The file size of each is 22.9 MB and 18.1 MB, respectively. Let's say we have a 10 minute long song (that's really long) with 4 layers, and you end up re-recording everything twice from start to finish. 20 MB * 4 * 3 = 240 MB for the entire project. That means in the Lite plan you get 42 songs. Sounds pretty reasonable to me.
The obvious argument is that as a musician, you want completely lossless compression. I say that quality 10 OGG is good enough, although if you simply cannot accept that, I understand.
Also, I have plans for creating a program that runs in the background of your computer and does all the dirty work for you.
Lossy compression is absolutely unacceptable for work-in-progress files. The point of this exercise is to allow project files to be bounced back and forth between collaborators relatively seamlessly. Introduce lossy compression and you have to worry about generational loss - if the guy at the other end edits the file then it goes through the codec again and before long you've got a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy. All the major DAWs can import MP3s, but those that I'm familiar with need to decode them back to WAV/AIFF to handle them internally. This would demand something reasonably clever on the client-side to prevent all sorts of difficulties when an edited song is re-exported and uploaded back, because even without any edits the decode-encode cycle would mean that an exported track would diff with the originally imported version. It also takes bloody ages to bounce every track in a project to MP3, although that could be simplified somewhat if your planned client tool handled it.
Also a 10 minute song isn't really long - it's long for a pop or rock single, but by no means unusual for a 12 inch mix in a lot of dance music genres. Seven minutes is about average for House these days.
However while this might not be great for close collaborators, it would be very good for remix competitions and less structured collaborations. There is a bunch of sites devoted to these sorts of things, and this would have a huge advantage over them.
It would be a lot more credible to feature a few (good) tracks on the front page.
The Arena and Workbench buttons have no mouse-over help text, and at first glance seem unrelated to everything else on the page.
It's not entirely clear what sort of software/hardware I need to get involved here. I used to work with Cubase and Wavelab, for example. Can I just upload WAV files from whatever? The "How does it work" section isn't explicit about which formats it deals with.
It seems strange that you can go visit competitions, but not project or user pages, which I thought were the main point of the site.
I love the legal section.
My band was relatively email savvy, but I regularly met bands that didn't contain a single individual that was tech savvy. If they had band email or a Myspace page, it was usually run by a "manager". I found this phenomena sad and scary, but it really was a culture thing.
I suspect it'd apply less to the electronic music folks, due to the inherent geek savvy required. However, tl:dr; I have a hard time picturing most of the musicians I've played with understanding the basic concepts of version control. Heck, I bet most wouldn't get it after the third explanation.
Musicians aren't dumb, but they are usually hung-over. Conflict merging is not punk.
Perhaps I should try harder to get the user to click the "How does this work?" link or use some of the same content.
Instead of "how does this work?" repeated 3 times, maybe you could put a single link that says "see how it all works".
re: soundcloud
Consider removing the reference to soundcloud. The best it can do is give give the lawyers an excuse to go after you for UI Copyright infringement.
re: value prop
The intro page does a good job motivating someone to use the product, but the homepage doesn't help sell the product at all. See if you can summarize the pain points on the homepage.
Also consider putting up a forum for musicians to collaborate/share/find each other (ala FLStudio Looptalk). The fastest way to get people to use a sharing product is to help them have people to collaborate with ;)
Good luck!
Looking at the actual pricing plans, $228/yr for the medium 20G plan. 20G doesn't go far in my studio, so this wouldn't work very well as a long term backup/version control system, it would only be useful for collaboration of a few projects at a time and then I'd have to dump projects.
The $1068/yr plan is just too much for me to pay for 100G storage. I can rent a dedicated server with 2TB storage for less than that. Also even 100G doesn't hold my projects from the last six months.
I think it's the cost of providing bandwidth and storage for this stuff, it's a serious challenge to the viability of this startup. What you have sounds cool and I bet it works really well, but the file size issue and the cost, man oh man.
The best way to think about this is full-service multi-person versioning for sound projects. It also analyzes your project files and makes sure all the dependent sound files are present and error-free (from what I understand).
I think this will especially become useful for studios when it supports project files from Logic, etc, and especially when it can work directly as a plugin for these programs without needing to log into the website and check stuff out and upload updates.
A lot of companies have interesting offerings in this space, but I haven't seen anything truly compelling yet. Perhaps the most direct competition is bundled with the tools themselves: for example, FL Studio has [edit: had] Collab and Ableton has Share.
You also support LMMS. But few if any serious musicians use LMMS; it's just not a high enough quality tool. Even if you are targeting people like me -- dedicated hobbyists -- you're still more likely to want to target Ableton and FL.
I agree that I need to support Ableton and Cubase. I'm going to start working on more studio support right now.
As for LMMS, I suppose I supported it just for fun. I've contributed to LMMS, and compared to .flp, support for it was dead simple.
By the way, how do you crack the FL file format? (Or do you?)
A long time ago, the author of FL Studio made a document explaining the file format. That was version 4 or something. Since then much has changed.
However Tobiass Doerrfel, the author of LMMS, did a bunch of reverse-engineering of the fl studio file format.
Then I did some emailing with Didier and a guy named Frederic, who did the Fruity Wrapper (needed to get plugin names).
The results are open source: http://github.com/superjoe30/PyDaw
What mean "Unleash the producer in you."??
If I don't know what is for in less than 5 seconds I'll probably close the page.
Check out these ones as examples: http://basecamphq.com/ https://www.dropbox.com/
Take a look at http://www.merge.fm - they're doing something similar but making the barrier to entry trivial.
They're allowing normal people to interact with their favorite artists DURING the songwriting process. Who knows if it will gain widespread adoption, but it's an interesting approach nonetheless.
* you don't have a "git log" with an audio preview in each version
* what about all the samples that your project depends on? Do you add them to the repository? What about when you have two projects that use the same samples? What happens when your hard drive gets wiped and you lose the samples you didn't commit to the repository?
* what about the plugins you use? github can't keep track of the dependencies of the project.
* what if you want to collaborate on a project? if two people edit and try to push, you'll have a conflict which is impossible to merge
SolidComposer solves all of these problems.
But I guess my gut reaction — which you can take with many grains of salt because I don't do any work in a collaborative music composition situation — is that of "Geez...it's hard enough to get technical people to jump into my version control workflow, how could I get musicians in on this?" (Which I think you already addressed in another comment that your target audience is maybe the overlap of developers/composers.)
I'm reading through your Introducing SolidComposer page and I think it would be helpful if you could condense that down and put it somewhere more accessible (maybe on the front page). I find myself not really wanting to spend time figuring out how the app will help me.
Also, the How Does It Work? section actually does not seem appealing. The first situation seems simple and straightforward, whereas when you talk about SolidComposer complaining about missing dependencies, that starts makes me feel uncomfortable.
Anyways, I hope this is helpful and good luck with the project.
Side note: I recently started playing in a band and one thing I notice is that whenever we get together to practice a particular song, we are always reinventing the song and it never really seems to gel. It's always "How does that part go again? How many measures were we supposed to play that riff?" Could SolidComposer help in that situation?
Also since the studio uses only the filename as the identifier, you might make invalid assumptions.
Yes, copyright is a problem but it can be worked around somewhat. I would probably start by searching for open source sample libraries to see if anything is worth building on. Obviously people using only their own samples will have to upload them somehow.