I can only give so much insight, as I am not a producer, but I hear my friends who do produce regularly complaining about their DAW crashing and losing all of their work. Hell, there have been dozens of videos gone viral and memes made to describe the event and the rage that can follow thereafter.
Word processors dealt with this issue years ago — the minimal strain a word processor puts on any system allowed developers to put there focus on other functions, eventually adding a native backup that can restore any crashed sessions to a “near”-complete state. (Thank god I’m a writer.)
That’s a problem programmer Steve Martocci was focused on fixing when he coded Splice, a tool that can back up musicians’ files to the cloud.
Martocci didn’t stop there, though. He had a grander vision for his program. After adding some social networking abilities in 2013, the EDM community caught wind and began using Splice as “a sort of GitHub for DJs, where artists build and branch off tracks together, like programmers do when they collaborate on code.” One of the first major adopters of the service was Alesia, who “who used to export files track by track and share them with collaborators via email. But when Alesia opened its music to the Splice community, 100 producers made remixes without a single file transfer.”
The capacity for producers to share and collaborate on music is bottomless. The hope is that Splice will become like a sort of Google Docs for music, where two people can edit a track simultaneously and allow for even broader possibilities in production. It could even become like Twitch or Mixify, where others can join in and add their two cents, or observe as producers tweak and fiddle with equalizers and synth patches. Though, hopefully, at that point, it won’t turn into another “Twitch Plays Pokémon” fiasco.
You can check out Splice for yourself here.
H/T: wired