Paul Oakenfold crowdsources a beat on beatlab
beatlab.com
beatlab.com
EDIT: I see that beatlab call it that as well.
Currently, beatlab.com is just me, but it is an incredibly fun project to work on. I'm based out of San Francisco.
Of course, It's fun to get to do projects with people like Paul Oakenfold. But it's also incredibly rewarding to interact with young kids on the site that have no preconceived notions of how music should be created, and to watch them progress on beatlab.
1. If you want to force people to listen to the whole thing then by all means force them too, but it will decrease engagement from people checking it out quickly. 2. Things I listen to first from a song, intro, chorus, breakdown, outro. If you're using Grids then this could even be marked out. If you have a waveform then this makes it easier and you can look to see the structure from the get go. 3. One thing to be aware of is that if music tastes do change (ie non-quantised music such as Electronic Dance Music) then your market could deacrease as I imagine you're placing yourself in the market as a online version of what Fruityloops was to kids back in the 2000's.
But one thing that precludes my own participation is, that beatlab is essentially a walled garden :-S. While this may be a fun app that brings kids closer to music, it's just impossible to attract serious musicians to a web-based step sequencer with no download options whatsoever. The Facebook login doesn't help either.
I've intentionally ripped the Come Together vocals and am going to use them in a way that even YouTube infringement algorithms aren't able to fingerprint. Just for the sake of truly creating something new out of the samples \o/.
I hope you understand that this is nothing personal, it's just the true everything-is-a-remix mentality that's prevalent among music makers on forums, SoundCloud and the like. If that's the crowd you'd eventually like to attract, that's the mindset you'll have to get accustomed to and support with beatlab's features.
I agree regarding facebook. I plan on offering soundcloud and google logins as well.
What kind of projects are you looking to have people work on? And/or what skill sets of are looking for?
Many hit hip-hop and electronica songs could have been composed on something similar to beatlab. The amount of additional complexity required is minimal.
For example, one project is to create another area of the site for laying down vocals over a beat. The grid is a poor metaphor for these kinds of things. The vocals will by recorded separately, and then independently synced up with any other grid on the site.
Another project is to allow for the arrangement of grids into a basic song structure. For example, there should be the intro grid, the chorus grid, etc..
Oh, and congrats on getting Paul Okenfold on board, some coup!
One other suggestion tough, once a track has been saved, there doesn't seem to be a way to change the privacy settings (eg, to make my track private, I basically edited it, deleted the original and resaved - if there is a simpler way, it isn't clear what it is).
Other than that, I like it. I think its still a little simplistic, but its an excellent start and you did say that you have a ton more planned - great work! I'll be looking forward to seeing this progress.
ben@whiteraverrafting.com
a) I visit the page
b) I get redirected to http://www.beatlab.com/flash_blocked.html
c) I click on the blocked flash to unblock it, like on every other site.
d) I get a "Flash has been unblocked! You may continue to beatlab."
e) I click the link and end up at a)
:(
I'd love to see a replacement for SWFObject that just brings up a modal dialog in the case where Flash is blocked, allowing you to click-to-enable the applet.
The HTML WebAudio API isn't quite there yet, but it's making great progress. It is already deployed in Chrome, with releases in Safari and iOS on the way. I actually have a branch going that uses the WebAudio API to mix sounds and doesn't rely on flash at all.
I could turn off javascript and spend all day criticizing websites, I don't think any one would give too much care.
Your Javascript comparison is inaccurate, no one is demanding the site should work without Flash. If a site redirected you before you could click on noscript (or whatever Javascript blocker) to load all scripts, I bet you there would be a lot of complaints.
This website does not let me do that. It redirect to a different page, and forces me to white list everything. Something I rarely do.
That's quite hard on a one-man show which is in the edge of not requiring flash, for requiring flash.
I would reserve such harsh criticism for sites I have to visit and which are not even intended to work: city council, theatre box office, local public library. Heck, even the London Olympics user experience was broken, I read.
One of the difficult parts is actually detecting if flash is blocked at all. If the user has Google Chrome's built-in plugin blocker, I don't think it's possible to distinguish between a blocked plugin or a slow loading plugin.