Ohm Studio - Open for everybody (beta)

[darsho]

don't get me wrong, I like the idea and was really curious to try it out.
I like social functions in it, it seems to make it easy to find collaboration partners.

But sequencing hardware is imo the first and fundamental function of a sequencer (DAW), so I kind of have to lol, because that is not possible.

Not everybody works with VSTi-plugins.

please hurry up to make it possible to route MIDI to external gear and send MIDI clock.
If this works, I will give Ohmstudio another try.

P.S.:

I'd love an offline mode as well.
two reasons :

1) I like to make a little mixing on my laptop when I vist my parents or grandmother and they don't have internet. Plus my UMTS doesn't work there, as it's the countryside. Not that offline mode is essential to me, but think about this :

2) if you Ohm Company goes bankrupt and the servers are offline, all Ohmstudio user's projects are lost ?
I hope your company never gets in trouble at all, but you never know.

[Loki Fuego]

Stop complaining. The purpose of Ohm Studio is to enable online collaboration. How are you going to do online collaboration, while being offline?

Reconnect when Ive got the bit Im working on done?

Or are you assuming 'online collaboration' can only mean 'online live collaboration'. You want to cripple the options for refining something at your convenience before passing it back to your collaborator? Why?

Yep. You see the key feature of Ohm Studio is 'online live collaboration'. For other types of collaboration there're regular DAWs.
Right now asking for offline mode is the same as asking to Facebook to work offline. It's useless offline. I don't see any reason why anybody would want to use it offline. Maybe just because it's free right now?

[Red_Force]

Or are you assuming 'online collaboration' can only mean 'online live collaboration'. You want to cripple the options for refining something at your convenience before passing it back to your collaborator? Why?

It doesn't really matter actually : as I explained a bit above, even the kind of collaboration you're describing here needs some serious thinking to happen smoothly if you allow offline usage, ie good chances of desync. What happens if two user make edit on their separate versions off line, then get online ? Troubles. And that would happen a lot.

[Red_Force]

But sequencing hardware is imo the first and fundamental function of a sequencer (DAW), so I kind of have to lol, because that is not possible.

From what we saw so far (like the feedback here, for instance) I'd say it's actually not the typical setup. Even when people use hardware that can do stuff software can't (ie generally expensive hardware) it doesn't mean they're sequencing it rather than just recording it. Now I wouldn't say it's rare either. But at least you know why maybe didn't gave it enough thinking so far. Can't tell how much of a fuss it would be to solve, but this will certainly be brought on the table.

2) if you Ohm Company goes bankrupt and the servers are offline, all Ohmstudio user's projects are lost ?
I hope your company never gets in trouble at all, but you never know.

This will be answered soon. It sure is a key concern.

[samsam]

"An internet collaboration tool? What happens if you don't have internet?" Well, I guess you don't use this app, right?

D/Ling now, all the best OhmForce for trying something different.

[whyterabbyt]

Or are you assuming 'online collaboration' can only mean 'online live collaboration'. You want to cripple the options for refining something at your convenience before passing it back to your collaborator? Why?

It doesn't really matter actually : as I explained a bit above, even the kind of collaboration you're describing here needs some serious thinking to happen smoothly if you allow offline usage, ie good chances of desync. What happens if two user make edit on their separate versions off line, then get online ? Troubles. And that would happen a lot.

Well, there's two approaches I can think of which would allow it to work, albeit with user intervention required to resolve conflict decisions (which is the only way to resolve them IMO).

You either have a CVS style 'check out' option for a track, which gives one of the collaborators the option to take exclusive control over it until they check it back in, or you 'fork' the track so that its duplicated into separate versions each with only one set of local or remote changes, and the users have tools to manage and negotatiate merging them into a resolved 'collaborative' version. Alternative takes of the track, basically, one per collaborator.

[whyterabbyt]

Yep. You see the key feature of Ohm Studio is 'online live collaboration'.

why is it key? where does the information on OS say its key?

Their blurb says 'a modern, professional DAW for any musician' not 'a modern, professional DAW for any musician who only wants to collaborate live'

For other types of collaboration there're regular DAWs.

you mean the ones without collaboration tools? erm, that's just a silly thing to say.

you're saying Ohmforce were mistaken when they call it 'the best tool for online collaboration' then?

Right now asking for offline mode is the same as asking to Facebook to work offline.

No, not even close. Its akin to wanting access to a CVS or Git code repository offline.

It's useless offline. I don't see any reason why anybody would want to use it offline. Maybe just because it's free right now?

If you can't comprehend something, best not to comment on its usefulness, then.

Here's a clue.

"Bugger, we're not getting anywhere with these drums. Why dont I dump this onto the laptop and play with it for a day or so and see if I can get somewhere with them"

or

"You know what would go well here. Some field recordings from that building site near me. I'll go record some and cut them up roughly while Im there."

[Fire Sledge - Ohm Force]

This has already been stated in this thread:

1. Yes, we recognize a need for an off-line mode. I am personally a strong advocate for such a mode.

2. No, we haven't the resources to make it work now. We had to make choices; when we sorted features by priority and cost it was not retained for the initial version. Later, most likely, but don't expect it in the short term.

— Laurent

[Red_Force]

No, not even close. Its akin to wanting access to a CVS or Git code repository offline.

We of course know (and use for years) this kind of tool (CVS,SVN,Mercurial for me) for collaborative work. But we're afraid it's way too complicated for a musician's audience. We want to make a good collaborative sequencer for everyone, beginner and professional... in music, not in computer gizmo. A lot of very professional musicians know how to handle at least one complex sequencer, the basic of Midi, of digital Audio,... but CVS ? Different beast. Hard to learn because comes with new concept, and requires some brain juice to figure out the trees, branch, etc.

We're looking for something that will work by default with uneducated audience, remember. Else no matter how well you deal with it, the ohm cohmmunity will be drawn with broken project.

[Loki Fuego]

If you can't comprehend something, best not to comment on its usefulness, then.

If you can't comprehend that currently Ohm Studio on its own can't compete with bigger DAWs, then all your other comments are irrelevant. If you can, then you are just wasting a lot of time by writing these comments. End of story.

To Ohm Team: my personal suggestion would be first to add more important features like MIDI-out, better modular interfaces (which wouldn't generate tens of mixer strips and sequencer tracks, unless they are used), sample browser and anything else, and only then consider speding time on offline mode. If you add offline mode Ohm Studio would be percieved just another DAW with on fancy feature, and eventually it would fail as it won't be able to compete with bigger DAWs (especially consider if Ableton is developing something similar for Live). If will keep adding more feature, while keeping it online only, it would be percieved as unique product. And by pushing using to collaborate more, later on when you add offline mode it would be percieved just as another feature among others (unlike now when it's considered prerequisite).

You made a sound business decision now stick to it. Imagine Steve Jobs deciding to add keyboard to first iPhone just because it was considered a prerequisite for a phone back then.

PS: Yeah, I'm a business advisor during daytime. Contact me if you need more advice

[LawrenceF]

I'm just curious about the uploading process. When it starts and when it stops.

If I'm recording a vocal track, doing multiple takes, is all of that stuff continuously uploading? If so (just asking) that would seem to be an awful waste of bandwidth for people like me with 384k upload speeds.

It seems to me it might be better to tag tracks to sync or not if that's happening (again, no clue, just asking)... if just to reduce the strain on the server.

I actually meant to open a new project and disconnect from the net and see if I could still record. I mean, I wouldn't want all of my takes uploading, only the ones I like when I finish recording.

So this is really more of an electronic music collab tool or more for people with really fast Internet speeds? Uploading a stereo 48k wave track takes quite a long time here with my DSL... which is why I use FLAC for that currently.

And then (it seems, again, just asking) the sync for the other person doesn't start downloading until they open the project so if the tracks are 1gb and they have a slow connection... they open the project and go do something else for an hour?

Those are my unanswered questions about audio recording. Midi? Sure... midi data flies over the net. Audio? Not really. Nothing realtime about waiting for 1.5 gb of audio to download.

Anyway, great tool. It does seem to be more about electronic music though.

[Fire Sledge - Ohm Force]

I'm just curious about the uploading process. When it starts and when it stops.

Samples are not sent losslessly first. They are first split in blocks of about 20 s and there are three compression levels for the upload:

- Vorbis q -1, 3 kB/chn/s, lossy
- Vorbis q 4, 8-9 kB/chn/s, lossy
- WavPack, ~50 kB/chn/s, lossless

They are prioritized so blocks of the second compression level are sent only when all blocks of the first compression level have finished uploading. Same thing with the lossless compression level.

Only sample referenced in the session are uploaded, so if you records 50 takes and eventually delete 49 of them to keep only one, Ohm Studio will quit uploading the deleted samples. And when you close a session, upload and download are stopped and will resume when you open it again.

Of course the first compression level is far from perfect quality-wise, but it's decent enough to get an opinion about the audio content and to start working. Second compression level is already quite close to the original (equivalent to 128-144 kbps stereo AAC).

This guaranties that sessions with lots of huge samples can load very quickly even on a small bandwidth connection (often, the first level has finished downloading before all the plug-ins are loaded). Actually the HDD write speed was much more of a concern on the downloading side, so we decode the Vorbis levels in real-time and only store the final sample on disk, when the WavPack level is received.

I hope this enlighten you about sample transfer in Ohm Studio.

— Laurent

[LawrenceF]

I hope this enlighten you about sample transfer in Ohm Studio.

— Laurent

Yes it does. Thanks.

The product looks potentially great and of course you have to face the general DAW user tide that thinks every DAW should do everything every other DAW does or it's a fail, so I don't envy you in that regard.

I laughed a bit reading the forum and seeing someone making FR's that would "Make Ohm Studio the BEST DAW EVER!!!!!". Inevitable.

Anyway, once it's out of beta and stable I'll to try to use it for mixing, if I can convince some people I work with to compose in it. For me, that would make life a bit easier ... to just open their Ohm Studio project and let the tracks download and just mix it there and print the mix back to a song track.

Thanks Laurent. Much success to you guys.

[bailees7irish]

Stop complaining. The purpose of Ohm Studio is to enable online collaboration. How are you going to do online collaboration, while being offline?

Reconnect when Ive got the bit Im working on done?

Or are you assuming 'online collaboration' can only mean 'online live collaboration'. You want to cripple the options for refining something at your convenience before passing it back to your collaborator? Why?

Yep. You see the key feature of Ohm Studio is 'online live collaboration'. For other types of collaboration there're regular DAWs.
Right now asking for offline mode is the same as asking to Facebook to work offline. It's useless offline. I don't see any reason why anybody would want to use it offline. Maybe just because it's free right now?

[bailees7irish]

I hope this enlighten you about sample transfer in Ohm Studio.

— Laurent

Yes it does. Thanks.

The product looks potentially great and of course you have to face the general DAW user tide that thinks every DAW should do everything every other DAW does or it's a fail, so I don't envy you in that regard.

I laughed a bit reading the forum and seeing someone making FR's that would "Make Ohm Studio the BEST DAW EVER!!!!!". Inevitable.

Anyway, once it's out of beta and stable I'll to try to use it for mixing, if I can convince some people I work with to compose in it. For me, that would make life a bit easier ... to just open their Ohm Studio project and let the tracks download and just mix it there and print the mix back to a song track.

Thanks Laurent. Much success to you guys.

<sarcasm> yeah, i know... hoping for an offline mode is asking SO much... and it just doesn't make ANY sense to request it, does it? </sarcasm>

some people are too funny