The Song Fight Bulletin Board

Hi All,
I just saw that Spotify has an online collaboration site called https://www.soundtrap.com where you can make music alone or with others. They have a 30 day trial.

I've also seen www.jamkazam.com as a place where you can play music together online.

Anyone tried either of these or have other suggestions of ways to jam virtually?

Ken

Another choice is ninjam, which is good for jazzy jam type stuff. It only really works if the chord progression and tempo stay fixed throughout the song though.

I wish the startup I worked at briefly in 2011 had survived; they had some really amazing low-latency videoconferencing stuff that was actually usable for jamming.

Some folks mentioned this on fb as a way to make videos with multiple takes: https://www.mixcord.co/pages/acapella

This isn't web-based and I think it's iOS-only, but for those in the Apple camp it might be worth checking out: https://endlesss.fm/

I've been playing with endlesss a lot lately and it's a lot of fun. It's very loop-oriented and the instruments don't give a huge amount of flexibility but it's fun to jam with random people on the Internet in a constrained way.

They also often have a live stream of an ongoing jam at https://www.twitch.tv/endlesssfm - I spent about an hour participating in that when I should have been working this morning, and it was lots of fun.

Endlesss is doing a kickstarter for their DAW version, which looks pretty cool. I'm a backer, and here's a referral link: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/en ... ref=31z2ze

Someone just told me about http://llcon.sourceforge.net They said it didn't work for them, but might be worth trying if folks are interested.

Ooh, interesting. 40ms max latency gives me pause (no pun intended) but it's definitely worth trying.

I should see how hard it is to run the server on one of my actual, you know, *servers*, which would probably work better than my home connection.

I tried it out a bit and while I couldn't find anyone nearby enough to jam with (there sure are a lot of empty servers!) it seemed to at least work pretty well on loopback, at least when connecting to servers no more than 45ms away. We should try scheduling a time to try things out together.

I can run an instance on my server in Fremont, CA, but there are, again, lots and lots of servers just like... available and wide-open.

Was looking for something else and found www.rifftr.com, which allows you to upload a video of yourself playing and then others can add videos of themselves playing along.

It seems relatively new:

Together with a couple friends we have developed an app where you will be able to play together and we are looking for people to test it!

The app lets you upload videos of yourself playing an instrument. If someone else comes and likes your track, they can respond to it by playing over your base track. That will create a new video of the two playing together. If this keeps happening a tree of compositions will be created. Basically, like a reddit conversation but with music. We have also developed a way to explore this tree of compositions so anyone can join at any point they like!

Ah, nice, I'm surprised it's taken this long for that sort of thing to happen at that scale. That's exactly what I was trying to build towards with Project (which I really need to put back online somewhere...) and I've seen a few ad-hoc things like that on YouTube but nothing formalized.

I wonder if they'll also move to "delayed live" streaming.

Looks like it's still in closed alpha and mobile-only, though, which is unfortunate, but I've signed up to try it out anyway.

Facebook has a similar sounding music video collaboration app they're working on called "Collab". I heard about it from Carol Cleveland Sings, they've been involved in early testing of it to some degree. You can see pictures/video of them (the band used to just be Thomas back when the band was doing Song Fight but as of several years ago it's been a duo of him and his now wife) in the promotional materials even. It's iOS only and in a private beta. I've signed up but don't have an iOS device to try it on.

https://npe.fb.com/collab/
https://npe.fb.com/2020/05/27/collab-ma ... 're-apart/
https://musically.com/2020/05/27/facebo ... aking-app/