Soundcloud has sort of taken the music community by storm this past year. Starting about a year ago they just announced they are 500,000 users strong last week on their Twitter page. The service is designed for musicians to share music, generally with each other and allow for a commenting system for that music. Other features include a music dropbox and and enmbedable/customizable java player.
They have announced at NAMM that they are parterning with several companies, the first of which is Presonus to allow for direct uploading to the service from audio applications. Audio File Engineering is another partner and it is reported that Ableton Live will soon include the feature as well.
This is exciting news for the site and for the music web business. We have seen this sort of integration with other social networking services before, but not in the music world. How the feature is exactly going to be implemented is unclear at this point. Soundcloud has grown in large part due to its ability to easily distribute audio files and remix packs online. The ability to upload individual tracks within an audio project would be a useful one indeed.
Quote Alexander Ljung, SoundCloud CEO:
“We’re very excited to be launching the first of our music softwareintegrations with PreSonus and Audiofile Engineering. With these upcoming partnerships it’s possible to imagine a production workflow in which you produce a track, upload it to SoundCloud, and send it direct to Abbey Road for mastering without any files hitting your desktop. We’re imagining a future where music professionals can seamlessly use the web together with their desktop tools in a fully integrated and extremely powerful combination. The SoundCloud platform and our open API, in combination with progressive companies like PreSonus and Audiofile Engineering, are making it possible for this future to arrive in 2010.”
Aviary, the makers of popular online image and vector editing tools has announced a new product to its lineup called Myna. Myna is a multi-track recording software akin to Garageband or Reaper. In fact the transport windows even act the same was as Garageband. It doesn’t support plugins, but it has all of the basic audio editing and multi-tracking tools one would expect from a piece of software like this like cut, paste, trim, automation and the like.
The effects section is rather slim pickings with only four slots available per track. It features the basics like phaser, flanger, ParaEQ, etc. but doesn’t appear to have a master effects channel
A test in Google Chrome with the interface is amazingly fast for a web application and was built using Flash. You can try the software for free at Aviary’s website. Overall it looks like a solid first start for a web based DAW like this and the foundation is there. Now lets just see if they can take it somewhere to begin to compete with desktop apps.
Features:
Powerful Clip Editing
Trim, Loop, Stretch and Reverse your audio clips, width editable loop points, and interactive time stretch capabilities.
Automation
Easily add fade-ins, fade-outs, pan from left to right, and modify gain over time, with editable control points.
Effects
Add non-destructive effects to your audio clips including Pitch Change, Reverb, Delay, Parametric EQ, and more.
Import / Export
Import your own audio files, or search one of our provided libraries. Mix it down and export directly to your desktop or publish back to your account.
Share and learn
Collaborate with other users. Follow step-by-step tutorials to learn new skills.
Here a question I have been asking myself over the past couple of months. For years the artist homepage has been the home base, the go to spot for people to find the latest information on their favorite artists. I myself have spent countless hours slaving our homepage design trying to find the right idea and concept that just worked for me and my music. When it is all said and done though does a homepage even matter anymore? The internet has matured a tremendous amount in just the past five years. Search has become the lingua franca so finding an artist has become more easy than ever.
When Myspace stormed onto the scene several years ago bringing with it the social ecosystem design for bands, it in some respects changed everything. The dichotomy of information changed from the listener seeking out the artist to instead the artist almost seeking out the listener. In the social networking ecosystem the information that the artist puts out is pushed to the user. There also seems to develop the insatiable need to get as many followers/fans/friends as possible regardless of how valuable they truly are. This is something that just was never really feasible with a traditional website. I myself have seen more traffic for my music with a blog style website than a traditional one, but even a blog to many extents is to slow these days.
There are now more social networking websites designed around music than ever before. Myspace is no longer the dominate player and arguably might not even be the best player if it was not for the fact of its large user base. Even complicating matters even more, services like Twitter are changing the game once again as they act as a platform to deliver information rather then a service. We are beginning to see services fold over onto each other as as post on to Virb for example can automatically update a band’s pages at Myspace, Twitter, Facebook and others. When people are actively spending their time on other services and not even necessarily visiting the websites of these services, does it not make sense to push our presence as musicians onto these services?
I guess that circles me back around to my original question. Is a homepage still needed? With the pervasiveness of all of these social networks that people presumably want to be a part off why would someone want to participate in the isolated island that a single band’s page could offer? Certainly if the band is big enough they could support their own social ecosystem around themselves, but for most of us that just isn’t possible. One argument could certainly be made towards the permanence that homepage offers. With the development of so many social platforms there are bound to be casualties in the process. Does an artist want to truly invest their time into updating all of these sites and at the same time what if they choose the wrong one, it goes belly up and much of their fan base, music and contacts are lost? Is the homepage relegated largely to operating as a portal for people to then branch out to the latest social network?
Lets her some comments and thoughts from musicians out there. Many of you that I see don’t have webpages. Those that do, how does your traffic and listens compare to what you get on a social network?
Grooveshark is one of many streaming music services online for music. While Pandora in many respects is the leader in this category, they are largely conservative in their design choices. GrooveShark is another such option for online radio and it is bringing something interesting.
Grooveshark is an excellent streaming audio service, and one of our favorites here at Download Squad. Yesterday, they announced early access to a redesigned Grooveshark 2.0 for VIP users.
The interface has been revamped, and long gone are the days where I had to upload missing tracks. Grooveshark’s library is massive, and I’ve been able to find bands that I once dug out of the Camelot Music sale bin. My long-lost Mind Bomb CD, missing since high school? No problem, Grooveshark’s got it now……..
