Idk if the GitHub analogy really works for music.

With software, the code is a tool. And you can give the code away and still make money on hosting, support, enterprise sales, consulting, recruiting, whatever.

With music, the stem is the product.

If the drum loop is mediocre, nobody cares. If it's actually good, the creator usually wants ownership, licensing, royalties, exclusivity, or at minimum, attribution. But even at that level, it's trivial. Once you remove the triviality of it, it becomes art, which is the product.

People absolutely want cloud collaboration though. Shared sessions, async recording, version history, stem exchange, all of that makes sense.

But public forks of high quality musical material don't really compound the way software tools do. Most musicians are not trying to maximize downstream reuse of their riffs by strangers on the internet.

Bandlab Studio, maybe? Never used it, but might be what you're looking for. There's a web version and a mobile app.

https://www.bandlab.com/creation-features

I think that's what Soloist[1] is trying to do (unaffiliated, but I've met the founder)

[1]: https://www.soloistapp.com/

That reminds me of what Splice used to do

Yes. I’ve wanted something like this for a while. I’ve always wondered why there isn’t version control for DAWs. So many times I’ve spent hours editing a track and accidentally saved it without specifying a unique file name. Only to open it later and wish I could go back to before the changes that fucked it up.

Could be pretty easy to do with atproto accounts. Users could save/share their music as a tangled.sh repo and other people could contribute or fork as they please. A nice UI could hide all of that and make it fun to collaborate on music.

Too bad I'm lazy. RiffHub looks neat.

Thank you :) I 'll look into it, I am a little cautious of bloating up the filesize (right now it's at 98kb of js and 10kb of css), but if I can make something work efficiently I 'll give it a go.

On an unrelated note, I'm a little surprised there is no good open source web audio tracker (like Renoise but for the web) out there yet...

Try Ocenaudio - I’ve used pretty much every audio editor free and paid for and this is my go to for a free editor.

I also cannot understand why anyone would recommend Audacity.

Have you tried Ardour? It's like a superset of Audacity.

when have you last tried audacity? it's been getting friendlier

Doesn't seem to support midi currently unfortunately. I was hoping for the same.

It's the audio track in a channel. A channel is the horizontal strip, a waveform box is a piece of audio somewhere across that strip. You can double click on one to enter single editor mode, or single click to make it active (once it's active you can drag it around, apply effects to it, move it on a different channel etc etc).

Sorry still working on improving the UX :)

EDIT: There's a short video here - https://x.com/pkalogiros/status/2053492761350046032

There is a little [ + ] button next to CHANNELS in the sidebar, it has no limit but right now so add as many as you like :)

It's using dom to render the multitrack waveform boxes currently so I would assume after a certain point it might start to slow down a bit. In the future might switch it all to be webgpu based to avoid such limits.

I usually use it to edit audio tracks quickly up to 10 minutes long, though I have received nice emails from people who have used for 1hr+ podcasts successfully (though certain heavy operations wouldn't be very fun to use).

For multitrack sessions, there is the ability to export to a .amss file that contains all the settings, markers, tracks etc. For single track edit... it would just crash right now. There is already a feature for caching audio tracks in indexeddb (it's under >File), but honestly it's not a web api I have found to be super reliable. I don't blame the browser developers, because I 'm sure if it was more reliable certain websites would put it to use storing gigabytes of trackers on the user's machine :). For this reason, I haven't made it auto-save the session automatically yet, trying to be a good citizen on the user's computer, maybe that will change in the future if there's a strong need for it.

Also, right now there is no backend, once it loads there are no more requests made to the server, so it's bound to frontend limitations. This is by design, I want it to be an app that respects users, doesn't upload or leak information, no ads, etc, even if it means getting a small hit in functionality in other areas.

I think of it like photopea/pixlr are to photoshop. Quick and easy to use, get you at 90% of the way. If somebody wants to do a serious operation, then by all means go for a paid desktop pro-daw solution :)

edit: reason

> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23337091