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You've identified one of the limitations of this service: it requires the musician to think about file size when creating a project. I agree that it is a seriou

You've identified one of the limitations of this service: it requires the musician to think about file size when creating a project. I agree that it is a serious flaw, but I do not think it is a show-stopper. I generated 10 minutes of white noise and saved it as 320kbps mp3 and quality 10 ogg. The file size of each is 22.9 MB and 18.1 MB, respectively. Let's say we have a 10 minute long song (that's really long) with 4 layers, and you end up re-recording everything twice from start to finish. 20 MB * 4 * 3 = 240 MB for the entire project. That means in the Lite plan you get 42 songs. Sounds pretty reasonable to me. The obvious argument is that as a musician, you want completely lossless compression. I say that quality 10 OGG is good enough, although if you simply cannot accept that, I understand. Also, I have plans for creating a program that runs in the background of your computer and does all the dirty work for you.

jdietrich 16y ago
I think you may be badly underestimating the track count of a lot of projects. If you aren't banking on having access to all the project plugins at the other end, then any track that is generated or processed by a plugin that isn't part of the factory set will need to be frozen to audio. Obviously there will be no alternates for these tracks, but they still add up. If you're recording live audio, then think of a number, add your age and double it. I would typically mic up a drum kit with between eight and fourteen microphones, depending on the size of the kit and the quality of the room. That is by no means excessive - a bargain-basement set of drum mics will usually consist of seven or eight mics. An electric guitar should get at least three tracks - two mics on the cab and one for DI. A decent pop vocal sound usually demands several tracks for the lead, plus backing. To give you an idea, Greg Kurstin used in excess of 70 tracks on most of the songs on Lily Allen's "It's Not Me, It's You" - an album recorded with only one singer, one microphone and two real instruments. Lossy compression is absolutely unacceptable for work-in-progress files. The point of this exercise is to allow project files to be bounced back and forth between collaborators relatively seamlessly. Introduce lossy compression and you have to worry about generational loss - if the guy at the other end edits the file then it goes through the codec again and before long you've got a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy. All the major DAWs can import MP3s, but those that I'm familiar with need to decode them back to WAV/AIFF to handle them internally. This would demand something reasonably clever on the client-side to prevent all sorts of difficulties when an edited song is re-exported and uploaded back, because even without any edits the decode-encode cycle would mean that an exported track would diff with the originally imported version. It also takes bloody ages to bounce every track in a project to MP3, although that could be simplified somewhat if your planned client tool handled it. Also a 10 minute song isn't really long - it's long for a pop or rock single, but by no means unusual for a 12 inch mix in a lot of dance music genres. Seven minutes is about average for House these days.

jdietrich 16y ago

I think you may be badly underestimating the track count of a lot of projects. If you aren't banking on having access to all the project plugins at the other end, then any track that is generated or processed by a plugin that isn't part of the factory set will need to be frozen to audio. Obviously there will be no alternates for these tracks, but they still add up. If you're recording live audio, then think of a number, add your age and double it. I would typically mic up a drum kit with between eight and fourteen microphones, depending on the size of the kit and the quality of the room. That is by no means excessive - a bargain-basement set of drum mics will usually consist of seven or eight mics. An electric guitar should get at least three tracks - two mics on the cab and one for DI. A decent pop vocal sound usually demands several tracks for the lead, plus backing. To give you an idea, Greg Kurstin used in excess of 70 tracks on most of the songs on Lily Allen's "It's Not Me, It's You" - an album recorded with only one singer, one microphone and two real instruments. Lossy compression is absolutely unacceptable for work-in-progress files. The point of this exercise is to allow project files to be bounced back and forth between collaborators relatively seamlessly. Introduce lossy compression and you have to worry about generational loss - if the guy at the other end edits the file then it goes through the codec again and before long you've got a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy. All the major DAWs can import MP3s, but those that I'm familiar with need to decode them back to WAV/AIFF to handle them internally. This would demand something reasonably clever on the client-side to prevent all sorts of difficulties when an edited song is re-exported and uploaded back, because even without any edits the decode-encode cycle would mean that an exported track would diff with the originally imported version. It also takes bloody ages to bounce every track in a project to MP3, although that could be simplified somewhat if your planned client tool handled it. Also a 10 minute song isn't really long - it's long for a pop or rock single, but by no means unusual for a 12 inch mix in a lot of dance music genres. Seven minutes is about average for House these days.