

Show HN: Soundkeep (Github for music) - joshontheweb
http://alpha.soundkeep.com

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csense
Great concept! Here are some random ideas:

1\. You should be able to attach metadata such as beats-per-minute or key
signature to each track, so it's easier to make remixes of tracks from
different songs.

2\. It would also be great if you had support for formats which include per-
note data like MIDI, Lilypond [1], and MOD/XM/IT. Bonus points for built-in
scrolling sheet music and/or Synthesia view [2].

3\. If you have an MP3 of each track, then mix them together to create another
MP3 of the final song, your data is going through the lossy MP3 encoding step
twice. Maybe you should have an option to store music in FLAC; perhaps a perk
only available to premium users (since it takes more resources).

4\. Content creators really want to find music to use in Youtube videos, phone
apps, games, whatever. People who upload songs to this should really have a
way to include license information. Bonus points if there's a search or RSS
feed for music by license type.

5\. You should be aware of DMCA compliance. If this app becomes successful, I
have no doubt that people will try to upload copyrighted songs, and you'd
better have a plan for dealing with takedown requests.

[1] <http://www.lilypond.org/>

[2] <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NuzP067_gZs>

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graue
Looks really cool. Unfortunately the play buttons do nothing. I'm assuming
this is because the files are mp3, and I'm on Ubuntu, which doesn't support
mp3s in <audio> tags in either Firefox or Chromium :( But maybe you could use
MP3.js to add support? <https://github.com/devongovett/mp3.js>

Edit: Also, even without that, it would be nice if this detected lack of MP3
support and produced a message of some kind instead of the play buttons simply
doing nothing.

Second edit: Yeah, this actually looks totally awesome. I hate that I'm
missing out.

~~~
joshontheweb
Sorry it isn't working. You are correct, it is the problem is the mp3 support.
Getting the audio to play cross browser hasn't been trivial. We'll look into
mp3.js.

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heynk
Very cool. I clicked around a bit and then watched the video which I found to
be very informative after you started playing with 'In Motion // Josh'. I
wanted to play with that track as well so I immediately started looking for
it, but since it's not on the home page I couldn't find it. Can you post the
link?

Since you only have 84 projects, why not either put them all on the home page
(although its already laggy) or paginate? It seems that you're already showing
66 projects on the front page as is.

~~~
joshontheweb
Good point. We should get that track on the live site. I'll let you know when
we get it posted. Our project count includes all projects. Sometimes people
remix a project but then never modify it. We screen this out of the Hot
Projects feed. Thanks for checking it out.

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manicho
I like the idea and in fact I have a side project that's somewhat similar.
I've been in the same boat where I thought music remixing and producing should
be more collaborative and a sharing process and chromes web audio api seems to
be a great tool for that.

Will your site eventually allow you to download a final mastered .mp3 or .ogg
file? Do you have plans to do more audio editing in the browser as opposed to
just layering one track on top of another?

~~~
joshontheweb
Thanks manchiko, we'll be adding the ability to download the mastered track
soon. We will likely be adding in extra editing features or even midi editing
but we'd like to see what kind of requests we get first.

~~~
lukifer
I know it's non-trivial, but I think one-click effects would be amazing as
well (reverb, chorus, distortion, etc). Think audio Instagram.

~~~
joshontheweb
Interesting. Reverb actually would be trivial since it comes built into the
WebAudio API. The others maybe not so much. What use cases do you envision
there?

~~~
lukifer
I'm thinking of easy ways for kids and newbies to join in the remixing process
with little prior musical training.

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lukifer
This is exactly what I hoped it would be based on the title. Nice job, looking
forward to seeing it grow!

Have you reached out to Trent Reznor? He's been a big leader in open-sourcing
his music and actively encouraging his fans to remix. I suspect Beck would be
interested as well; he recently released an album exclusively in the form of
sheet music.

~~~
joshontheweb
Thanks, We'd obviously love to work with both of them. I think we want to get
the community built up a little more and work all the bugs out before we start
doing that kind of outreach.

------
joshontheweb
The app is still in alpha and pretty rudimentary but we wanted to get some
early feedback from the HN community. If you are a musician, does this concept
appeal to you? What would you do differently?

~~~
veridies
It's a really cool idea and I'd love to use it myself. I would prefer lossless
tracks (all the examples I see are lossy MP3 or OGG), but that's a pretty
small issue. Time-stamped comments, like in SoundCloud, would be pretty cool.
And I can't figure out an easy way to see people's public remixes of a song.

The biggest problem I see is that you can't apply any effects to the master
bus (since, of course, each component track is played separately). I don't see
a good way to fix that. You might be able to do it by offering some VSTs for
download, allowing people to engineer the mix to sound right on their own, and
having a way to apply the same effects on the website. That's a really
difficult one, though.

To combine different projects, some form of excerpting / tracker would be
great. If I could select a fifteen second clip, loop that for a while against
another person's song, I could do a lot with that without ever leaving your
web page.

And even more importantly: time-stretching. I won't be able to merge tracks
into other projects without leaving the page if the tracks don't line up in
BPM. There should be a way to change that.

Seriously though, I really like this interface and I'd love to see it develop.
A few musician sponsors and this could be huge. The best of luck to you.

~~~
joshontheweb
Thanks for the great feedback.

We actually do allow you to upload in wav, aiff, flac but you can only
download in those formats if the tracks were uploaded in the same.

Using the WebAudio API we should be able to apply effects to the master bus.
This is our first test of the concept and it expects that you will do most of
the work in your DAW using the site for sharing. In future versions we want to
add more in browser editing if we get enough requests for it. Thanks for all
the suggestions!

~~~
veridies
"We actually do allow you to upload in wav, aiff, flac but you can only
download in those formats if the tracks were uploaded in the same."

That's perfect, great to know. Again, really cool service. Thanks!

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vangale
It looks like you're competing with ccmixter.org, loophunter, etc. but you're
still very early stage. There's no licensing information or
organization/categorization (which seems kind of critical for service like
this).

~~~
joshontheweb
Yes, we should be more clear about this point. Everything on soundkeep is
released through creative commons. We want our differentiating factor to be
the idea of people remixing each other and creating derivative work. We'll be
adding categorization soon. Don't have enough content to really warrant it
right now.

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yesimahuman
Hey Josh, congrats on launching! Unfortunately, it seems down for me.

Anyways, we met last month down in San Antonio. Let's stay in touch man and
good luck!

~~~
joshontheweb
Thanks. Sorry, our proxy server was choking for some reason :/ Good to hear
from you, Max.

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RK
Excuse my ignorance, but is there an equivalent to git for digital music
production?

~~~
joshontheweb
No, music offers a whole different set problems for version control. Getting a
traditional text diff on binary files doesn't do the user much good. We plan
on adding support for Midi soon and that will make it possible to be more
granular.

~~~
RK
That makes sense. It seems like you would need some non-binary meta
information about the wave forms, etc, that I'm sure would not be supported
across audio-editors.

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mehulkar
increase the dynos!

~~~
joshontheweb
Working on it. Sorry if you got timed out :/

