

 Rate my startup: SolidComposer - version control for musicians - AndyKelley
http://solidcomposer.com/

======
jdietrich
From the HN title I thought "fantastic, that's a brilliant idea", but I
honestly can't imagine anyone I know using what you're building.

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.

~~~
AndyKelley
You've identified one of the limitations of this service: it requires the
musician to think about file size when creating a project. I agree that it is
a serious flaw, but I do not think it is a show-stopper.

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.

~~~
jdietrich
I think you may be badly underestimating the track count of a lot of projects.
If you aren't banking on having access to all the project plugins at the other
end, then any track that is generated or processed by a plugin that isn't part
of the factory set will need to be frozen to audio. Obviously there will be no
alternates for these tracks, but they still add up. If you're recording live
audio, then think of a number, add your age and double it. I would typically
mic up a drum kit with between eight and fourteen microphones, depending on
the size of the kit and the quality of the room. That is by no means excessive
- a bargain-basement set of drum mics will usually consist of seven or eight
mics. An electric guitar should get at least three tracks - two mics on the
cab and one for DI. A decent pop vocal sound usually demands several tracks
for the lead, plus backing. To give you an idea, Greg Kurstin used in excess
of 70 tracks on most of the songs on Lily Allen's "It's Not Me, It's You" - an
album recorded with only one singer, one microphone and two real instruments.

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.

------
phugoid
Too many ideas on the main page. I showed up looking for version control due
to the HN link, but when I get there I see composer, compete, collaborate,
"the producer in you", backup, studio support (?). I suggest focusing on one
compelling feature/message.

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.

------
peteforde
I was in a touring band for a few years between roughly 2001-2004, during
which time I was freelancing - literally coding in the van with my laptop and
a GPRS card.

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.

------
spooneybarger
I'm a musician ( mostly analog one ) and have no idea from looking at the
front page what I could get out of this. Unless you are just looking for a
small subset of musicians, I would suggest a more beginner friendly
explanation of how it could be used. I had to dig into a non-obvious point to
figure out what you were doing and only because I also program did it all
really make sense to me.

~~~
AndyKelley
Good point. I put a lot of effort into this page:
<http://solidcomposer.com/article/introducing-solidcomposer/>

Perhaps I should try harder to get the user to click the "How does this work?"
link or use some of the same content.

~~~
lotharbot
When I looked at the home page, I thought the "how does this work" links were
to different pages or popups, each for an explanation of just that specific
piece.

Instead of "how does this work?" repeated 3 times, maybe you could put a
single link that says "see how it all works".

------
wavesplash
Awesome. I'm an FLStudio fan since version 2.

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!

------
bugsy
This is a great idea, but wow, there's going to be a lot of big files stored
and how much could one possibly charge for this is uncertain. I have a small
studio. If I was faced with paying let's say a reasonable $120/yr fee for this
service, I am pretty sure I would just lay out $120 for a backup drive
instead. So for the sole songwriter with technical abilities (needed to use
electronic music production software like DAWs) it's questionable. Now for the
collaborative job, yeah, I can see that working. It's a big hassle to keep
tracks synchronized with what other people are doing, so if done right there
could be a demand for this. The cost of getting it done right might be
prohibitory though. The first thing that will happen is the FL guy wants
compatibility with the Cubase guy wants compatibility with the ProTools guy,
which is a bigger problem.

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.

~~~
AndyKelley
You've inspired me to triple the space given out for paid plans.

------
JangoSteve
I played around with this a bit when we were discussing it in the #startups
IRC the other night, and I think this is a very cool idea. It certainly would
have helped back when my band was in the studio, in terms of making ongoing
collaboration with our producer much easier.

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.

------
davepeck
There are some interesting ideas here, but it feels unfocused. I suspect that
collaboration is where the really interesting opportunities are. To my mind,
version control is simply one possible feature you can offer to make
collaboration more fruitful.

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.

~~~
AndyKelley
Image-Line dropped support for collab, and people are sad [1].

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.

[1]: <http://forum.image-line.com/viewtopic.php?p=176830>

~~~
davepeck
I missed that about Collab, actually. Interesting.

By the way, how do you crack the FL file format? (Or do you?)

~~~
AndyKelley
A couple things.

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>

~~~
davepeck
That's really awesome -- have always wanted to find something like this.
Thanks!

------
tylerd
It's a cool idea. But the first time that I saw the homepage I had no idea
what is about. You need to make it clear.

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/>

------
delano
The "click here if you want to sue us" gag on the legal page is cute, but now
I'm thinking about all the possible reasons someone would want to sue you.

------
endlessvoid94
Love the idea.

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.

~~~
AndyKelley
Cool, that's a great idea. Very similar. I'll have to keep an eye on them.

------
0x5a177
Cool idea if you are a composer who likes to use version control! I just
recently started putting my GarageBand projects in GitHub =)

~~~
AndyKelley
That can work but there are some problems:

* 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.

~~~
0x5a177
Yes, I agree...GitHub or any text-centric SCM is a very simplistic solution
that really only works (and not very well) for metadata in audio projects.
These points are good answers to the question, "How is SolidComposer better
than using another version control system for my compositions?"

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?

------
Sizlak
Tuis is something me and my friends have wanted for years. We're primarily
Reason and Live users but this might be worth trying FL Studio for.

------
ddelony
Great idea, even though I'm not a musician. What I'd really like to see would
be a completely versioned filesystem like on VMS.

------
andrewljohnson
I need not read your post, nor try your app. Keep going man... this is a great
and long overdue idea.

------
Goladus
I think this would be cool if the software would try to obtain the
dependencies automatically.

~~~
AndyKelley
It does, if you've ever uploaded the dependencies before. It would be
copyright violation to do it if you hadn't.

Also since the studio uses only the filename as the identifier, you might make
invalid assumptions.

~~~
Goladus
Sure, I'm just pointing out a potentially valuable problem to solve.

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.

