Live online music collaboration technology?

[Lunch Money]

Yes, of course you are correct.

The soundcard latency becomes quite negligible when compared to network latency.

[Sascha Franck]

Someone should make use of Re-Wire and set up a little colab proggy - for cross-host stuff.

Rewire *might* be an option.
However, the source machine would still have to know which programs (or better: which plugins) the target machine would be running.
for me (at least for now) it'd just be cool to have some sort of generic rocket-like implementation, transferring audio files (compressed ones during the working stage), MIDI files and eventually some plugin settings (but those could also be hosted on some server).

I've collaborated quite a bit with various people in the past, and while the usual thing of adding files to an existent song isn't a biggie (you can either use rared up audio data or MP3s with a count in), it's a nightmare to work together on some project as lining up audio files just takes too much time.

In case we could use uncompressed audio data problems could be WAY reduced. In that case you could just have a shared FTP folder and exchange songfiles (using incremental indexing numbers or so) along with some audiofiles.
But even with DSL and other fast cnnections, things still aren't fast enough.

The main problem is working with compressed audio. For example, MP3s (or OGGs for that matter) converted to .wav alllways introduce a little bit of silence at the beginning, so lining them up exactly as they were meant is a tough thing (that's why you need to use count ins).
If someone would only come up with a compressed audio format without ANY length alterations when being back and fourth converted, things would be way better.
Sure, still nothing like a realtime jam, but at least one would be cross-host/platform compatible.

[Alive In Chernobyl]

WMA does not change time at all.

Monkey Audio does not change time.

Flac does not change time.

With fast connect you can afford Flac and Monkey Audio!

[Sascha Franck]

WMA does not change time at all.

WOW! This I didn't know! That's great news - I just tried and it worked almost perfectly. Well, the compressed -> decompressed signal wasn't 100% identical in terms of length, but 99.99% or so, which should be sufficient.
I made my test using 128kbps/stereo and the reimported and phase inverted signal almost cancelled out the original!

Does anybody know if Mac users can treat WMA as easily? I'm sometimes collaborating with some of them and one time this year I will get one myself as well (yeah, f****d up Logic/PC user here).

Really, time to say bye bye to MP3 for Win-Win collaborations!

With fast connect you can afford Flac and Monkey Audio!

Maybe, but those don't do any better than 50% compression or something around that, so it's too much for trying out things.

[griels]

The way RocketControl worked was via the use of COM automation. I think it may have been almost as simple as just fooling the app into thinking the user had chosen 'import audio' etc.

Maybe someone could use something like the following:

http://edgequest.com/Development/DelphiArtMoss1.htm

To replicate the same functionality in some way?

It's such as hassle having to reimport audio, align it and so on. If it could be automated somehow this would be so much better.

Of course explicit support for collaboration, or at least COM automation, in the host is the ideal.