Remote Music Solution: Could you use this right about now?

[nicolaslaget]

I am growing very frustrated with the current set of online cooperation for music.
I am thinking about developing something but before I dive in that rabbit hole I need to know if it's just me.

Imagine a solution as follows:

• DAW / OS agnostic.

• Broadcast your daw's output in stereo 256 kbps compressed audio (mp3 type

compression)

• Full spectrum audio. No filtering of highs and lows (think speech optimization in Zoom)

• Less than 2 sec latency.

• Zero installation required for client.

• Client’s ability to text chat and use your laptop’s mic to give feedback to engineer.

• Support for multiple clients to log into a session at the same time. (producer in NY, singer in LA, mixed by an engineer in VA)

• Secure access to session for client privacy.

[sin night]

I'm not into online collaborations so I can't say if your software could be successful; anyway it looks close to Steinberg VST Connect, except for:
- DAW / OS agnostic -> more plugin formats other than vst3?
- Zero installation required for client -> so clients can attend through browser if they wish (maybe with a reduced feature set, if something really requires an app?); I guess the studio running the session would still require a normal application/plugin to broadcast the audio from the daw.
- text chat -> this could be useful (I'm not sure this is avaible in VST Connect, the feature list says just "video chat").

Probably the only big limitation of VST Connect is the avaibility only as a VST3 plugin (at least on the daw/session side, because there are apps for people to join the session)... the other things are "nice to have" but far from essential in my opinion.

I would suggest you, if you haven't already done it, to do a search on what's already avaible on the market in order to do a comparison and find out what would be the key features of your app in comparison to the competitors (in my opinion, DAW / OS agnostic - or rather "wide support" - is the only strong sale point at the moment, the others are basic requirements or "nice to have" features)...

By the way, it looks like a serious project, requiring a big effort and a lot of time... but if you can make it way better than anything already avaible, then go for it (if financially sustainable, of course!).

Just my opinion, of course!

[sin night]

For example, it would be nice if session invitations are easy to share, maybe with some kind of integration with various calendars (so you can check if people have a free slot of time, check if they accepted the invitation, get reminders when it’s time for the session...).

If your software could also take care of the organization/scheduling aspects of the work (as if you’re using Skype For Business with Office, or G-Suite), that could be an advantage over competition...