Your DAW Is In The Cloud

It used to be that you needed pretty close to a million dollars to own a studio, and that was mostly for the gear. "Big Iron" consoles and tape machines were the norm and they cost big dough, not to mention all the outboard gear and wiring that you needed even before you got into the acoustic treatment of the room. But soon enough, the prices started to come down. First it an inexpensive  4 track, then 8 track, then 24 track tape machines that were a fraction of the price of a pro machine, but they still weren't quite up to the quality of the gear used in "real studios."

Of course that all changed with the digital age, as the gear got less and less expensive and more and more powerful. Suddenly just about anyone can have more power in their bedroom than The Beatles ever dreamed of having at Abbey Road. But it still involves at least some nominal cost.

So how does free sound? I was just turned onto something called the Burn Studios Audiotool, a free cloud-based music production studio for your web browser. There's a library of audio samples, a host of virtual devices including drum machines and synths, and a bunch of templates and tutorials to get you started. Of course you can only make MP3s or ogg files, but that mattered mattered all that much to a lot of people lately anyway.

This isn't the way I'd like to work, and pros will always want to have the best, but Audiotool just shows you how far we've come in the musical instrument and pro audio business. Let's hope that some kid with no money gets his chance because of tools like this. Check it out at Burn Studios Audiotool. It's fun.
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UJam - Innovation Or The End Of Serious Music?

Don't have any musical skills but want to write songs? Now you can with a cloud-based online platform called Ujam, which, as there site says, "empowers everybody to easily create new music or enhance their existing music talent and share it with friends."

The platform does what it says, according to the demo. You can sing a melody into it and it will come up with a pretty good sounding backing track with a wide range of styles to choose from. You can even tweak the chord changes and melody, change your voice into an instrument, change the sound and pitch of the vocal, and just about anything else you can do with a DAW or Garageband.

That being said, UJam doesn't seem to be Mac friendly as it wouldn't run for me on Safari, Camino, or Firefox, probably because I have Flash selectively disabled (it's a resource hog). Perhaps some of you will have better luck at trying it out than I did.

As a musician, I'm not sure how to feel about UJam. On one hand I admire the technology and the ability to create a song so easily, even if it's generic. It could be a good tool under the right circumstances. On the other hand I'm appalled at yet another instance of skirting the hard work of learning your craft to turn mediocre or no talent wannabe's into "songwriters" and "singers." I think many will agree with me that the whole idea of making music so easy that you don't have to pay your dues has undermined the quality of much of the new music that we hear today, and is at least partially the reason for the current music industry woes.

Check out the video below or look at the UJam site and tell me how you feel about this.

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You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Don't forget to check out my Music 3.0 blog for tips and tricks on navigating the music business.

Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

Recording In The Cloud

The latest hi-tech phrase leaking into our every day language is "cloud computing." Cloud computing means that instead of using applications or storing data on your personal computer, you upload everything to an online server via the Internet. The beauty is that you never have to worry about upgrading applications or worry about backups because someone else is doing that for you "in the cloud."

On a corporate level cloud computing makes sense and has been somewhat common for the past few years, but except for a few online backup services like Mozy and Carbonite, most consumers haven't gotten into it yet. They will soon enough as Microsoft has just announced that it's Office suite is now available for free as long as you use it in the cloud.

Now a company called Indaba has developed a way of recording multitrack audio and collaborating with other users in the cloud using their application. This wouldn't have been possible a few years ago due to the speed of just about all areas involved in the process, but Indaba says it's made breakthroughs in several key areas (improved audio quality, real-time effects, offline mode, and non-destructive editing) by switching from running on Flash, which hampered some audio features, to Sun’s new JavaFX platform.

I'm still not sure that it's fast enough for professional use (although I've not tried it yet), but if there's an idea that's capable of destroying the Pro Tools stranglehold on the music industry, this is it.

Indaba follows the "freemium" model, in that its basic version is free, a $5 per month fee gives you more control over effects, access to additional loop libraries, and more room to store songs and tracks, and a $25 per month fee offers unlimited session storage, unlimited private sessions, and other features required by full-time session musicians and other heavy collaborators.

Here's a video that explains Indaba's features.