Plaidophile

So, one of my former coworkers has been working on a startup called Jamglue, which is sort of like ccMixter only with a Flash-based mixing app built-in (the idea being that people can quickly throw together a mix or whatever). I've uploaded a bunch of my loops and song fragments to it, and people are doing some pretty cool stuff with it. I've also made a few mixes on there, one of which have been featured on a number of weblogs now.

One pretty nifty thing is you can directly embed a remix from a weblog, such as Robot Baby. The default embed code is excruciatingly ugly, though. But anyway, someone with a Jamglue account (which I have several invites for, by the way) can then go to the mix page and then immediately remix it, by adding other stuff, removing stuff in it, rearranging things a bit, and so on.

There's still some relative gimpiness with it, though. The flash mixer doesn't have any sort of snapping functionality (the ability to snap to beats and other regions is vital, and the ability to snap to zero crossings and do loop-painting and have finer-grained time control and so on would also be really nice). Also when the mp3 is downmixed it doesn't do any sort of normalization or compression or whatever so the resulting song is a lot quieter than it should be. The track automation is also pretty horrible. Generally it's a fun toy but not a serious production environment, though for more serious stuff it's easy enough to set up an arrangement, export an mp3, then bring that into Logic to record new material or whatever, which is where I think it will really shine as a community-driven remixing tool (it'll have to, since there's no beat-matching functionality like in a real DAW so it'll really have to come down to people recording new stuff to go against existing stuff).

Actually, Jamglue is conceptually similar to what I had in mind for the third iteration of Project, where I planned on having a timeline with the various clips on them and it'd just give everyone a rendering of some particular time segment for them to record against, and then the resulting clip would be inserted into that spot in the timeline or something. Obviously the Project notion was going to be a lot more abstract and opaque, since that was the nature of Project (collaborative improvisation between people who couldn't hear each other, guided by a higher-level process which could hear everything).

On a related note, I'd like to try out netpd but I haven't figured out how to get it to work on OSX (not that I've tried very hard).

Anyway, some random mixes from Jamglue:

• OCONE KIDS konfusion by michaelmuller — uses a bunch of <3 samples
• The Ballad of Haggity WagBag by fluffy — something I crapped out and which has gotten a lot of attention for some reason
• untitled by fluffy — random stuff I threw together. The piano is played (or at least was uploaded by) another coworker of mine.
• Infinite SADness by matt — The former coworker's tribute to Seasonal Affective Disorder. (For some reason, 'heaven bells' from <3 — Rhymes With Lucia has become incredibly popular.)