Forcing People to Listen to U2

The following is an excerpt of a 12 December 2014 email exchange between Art and Will. It should be noted that, since 1 November 2014, all Art's emails have originated from Farthington's account.

I'm hoping our recent exchange didn't turn you off. Let me know if it did or if you're still just busy.

At any rate, we lost electricity district wide and had no school today.

I've been thinking about moving forward with tracks that people can work on.

I now have Chromebooks through a grant and have been loving them for school purposes. Of course, I already use so many Google products anyway. Chromebooks are super fast because they never bring any software down onto them; all the apps run online. This fact has caused me to fall precipitously out of love with all things Mac and even more head over heels in love with Google.

Long story short: Mac and iTunes is so turn of the millennium. And now they are getting even more elitist with more expensive, cost-prohibitive gear and forcing people to listen to U2. Although I still have an iMac and a Macbook, I'm ready to move on.

Where am I going with this? Well, I'd like to move away from Garageband. It's not in keeping with the open-source ethos of the project. It's got some nice features, but it's surprisingly clunky for what comes out of it. I usually need to take the resulting MP3s into the open-source program Audacity to get them loud enough. Maybe this is an extreme analogy, but is Garageband going the way of Microsoft Encarta?

What we want is to create the lowest threshold possible for collaboration.

Okay, so what should we use?

Two possibilities that I've researched somewhat are TwistedWave or Soundation, both free, browser-based programs. You can read a quick paragraph about each of them in this article, "Best Free Audio Editing Websites." I don't mention JamKazam at this point for two reasons: one, we've already discussed it, and, two, I'm not sure it's positioned well in terms of becoming the next big thing (thereby getting lots of R&D money to make continual improvements and/or getting snatched up by Google to integrate into its ever-growing suite of awesome tools).

TwistedWave is designed to work seamlessly with Google Drive and SoundCloud. If you sign in with your Google account, you can use it for free (ignore the idiots who think you only get 30 minutes before you have to pay--they haven't signed in to their Google accounts).

Soundation is also friends with Google, but this one feature might make it even cooler than TwistedWave: you can make real-time recordings with friends using Google+ Hangouts!!! Last time I checked, that means up to 10 people recording at the same time with the added benefit of being able to see them on the screen. Soundation also supports MIDI, which means my crappy keyboard can be reincarnated as something better in the future. Finally, it seems much more of a community affair in general, with something like SoundCloud where people can post those waveform-style finished products and receive embedded comments from other Soundation members.

Neither of these, from what I can tell, has as many bells and whistles as Garageband. But bells and whistles can distract from the task at hand, from the architecture of the songs themselves. If we ever desperately want some fancy effect, we can go get it from other sources and import it as an MP3 track.

And both of these would create a much lower threshold than Garageband, which--either in perception or reality--is now part of that elitist suite of hardware and software that only rich, liberal Obama supporters like Joaquin Phoenix can access. I have it and you have it (because we fit all of the aforementioned descriptions), but there are potentially a lot of disenfranchised kiddos who won't be able to come to the party with Joaquin Phoenix.

I've used the open-source software Audacity a lot in the past, but it's a download, which means you work alone on your own computer and then have to share the file in some kind of clunky way.

Clunkiness still exists with the TwistedWave and Soundation options in that you cannot share a song file among collaborators (like a Google Doc, for instance). The commonsense solution to this seems that we could just give my password to trustworthy people and allow them to login and add their tracks. No need to have a Mac or PC or Chromebook, just get online and access the file. I know that Jamkazam allows for this free during the beta period, but it sounds like that will be a paid subscription thing later--again raising the threshold for participation and collaboration.

If we were worried about collaborators messing with things or we wanted to invite less trustworthy people to collaborate (for instance, if we just wanted to put the login information out on Facebook!), I think you can archive your work and save it somewhere. So, for example, were we to post the login information on Facebook encouraging people to add to a given song, we could download a copy of the current file in case people mess it up really bad.

That said, I think we would start with the former option first, that is, only giving the password out to select trustworthy people. But I do like bringing a wikipedia approach to collaboration. Of course, someone could get in, change the password, and destroy everything in Carlton Farthington's Google account.