quote:

Originally posted by DigiNut So the only real question is sound streaming. which I agree is tricky, but certainly not impossible. A decent broadband connection has at least 320 kbps upstream, and very few people can hear the difference in sound at 192 kbps. Given that it takes about 1 minute to encode a 10-minute MP3 at this quality, it could DEFINITELY be done in realtime.

One of the things with streaming is that is has a buffer, that's the point with streaming. The alternative is something like Skype.
As for compressing; 10 minute MP3 in 1 minute with 100% CPU, yes!
Do it realtime without effecting mixing.

I haven't said it's impossible, I'm just saying you won't get good quality or good latency. As for that Windows remotethingy, I know it's quick, but when I help people on 56k it takes about 5 - 10 seconds from when I click something till it apears. And it doesn't send the entire picture, just what's updated.

I would love helping out mkaing a program for FL that could send information between two clients. I know it's sometimes large amounts of data, but it could be done. Not excactly "realtime" but simmilar to CVS.
Let's say I make a pattern, then it would appear on his screen that I've made an update and if he wish to merge it into his project file. That's one way to cope with it.

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quote:

Originally posted by DigiNut You'd be surprised at how much data gets sent back and forth between hosts, VST, sequencers, etc. It's anything but "miniscule". Open up your process list and take a look at how quickly the memory usage is changing for your flstudio.exe or cubasesx.exe - that'll give you some basic idea as to how many bits and bytes are getting pushed around. Besides, the concept you're talking about would only work if both people were using all-software studios. What if someone is using hardware? And even though most people here probably don't care about this, it would get pretty expensive as both people would need to have their hosts/instruments/etc. fully licensed. It makes no difference anyway, because audio streaming would not be that difficult. The real problem is demand.

you don't understand

ALL THAT NEEDS TO BE TRANSFERRED OVER THE INTERNET ARE THE CHANGING OF VST SETTINGS (SIMPLE NUMBERS OF POT METERS) AND ADDING/REMOVING OF VST'S (ALSO SOME SIMPLE LINES) ETC ETC (VOLUME SETTINGS, NOTES ... ... ... )...

It's just as if a .flp file is sent every 5 seconds or something, the actual cpu processing comes from the vst on the user's pc

no audio needs to be transfered, only simple settings, dont u understand? also no graphics, just the two collaborating users each open fl on their own pc and the rest.. well duh

and now to show my feelings on the subject:

Nuendo has colaboration feature implemented in the software.

The Network Collaboration capabilities of Nuendo 2.1 allow true networking and teamworking on projects. It allows users to connect multiple Nuendo workstation computers via standard LAN network cards. An entire project or just selected tracks can be opened on multiple computers for other members of the network to access and edit. Complete management of access rights and user groups makes it easy to collaborate on large-scale projects.
The following list of features is only available in Nuendo:

Exclusive Features

Network Collaboration
The User Manager is the place to view all users in the network and define what other Nuendo users are allowed to do with your project. Are they able to read just some or all tracks? And even more important: Are they allowed to edit them as well? This
decision is naturally made by the owner of a project.
Network Permission Presets are real time savers. Once permissions are defined, they can be stored as presets and be recalled or edited for other projects.
Committing changes is the most important feature of the network
collaboration feature set. Edits made to you tracks or the tracks of others are transferred to the other systems connected.
Loading Changes will update one or more tracks of a project so the work of other team members is integrated.
Automatically Apply Changes applies immediate updates as soon as they
are available in the network.
The Shared Projects List provides an overview on all projects that have been opened for network access by their owners. The viewer’s personal access rights are visible next to the projects.
Locking Tracks makes it possible to get exclusive access to a certain track in case multiple users have editing rights. A track stays locked for the user who placed the lock until he himself or the owner of the corresponding project removes the lock.
A Chat Window is available for direct textual communication between all Nuendo users participating in a collaboration project.

But I don't think you can get it to work over the net. It is LAN only.

Last edited by DJDIRTY on May-29-2005 at 20:06

I'm a programmer.
I think that it is possible to be done easily with the system that some pepole suggested here (to transfer bits on every action)...

You don't have to stream audio or pics.
Think Simple
thats what programming is all about.

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And the reason for LAN-only is... read my previous posts!

Anyway, it's possible to do what Dickie-T is saying in Reason, not so easy with FruityLoops since it has VST's.

The problem is, the instructions has to be implented into the program on an early stage. I don't know if you can use the excisting MIDI controllers, but it could ease of the programming.
But Reason is only ONE program with only patches and samples to be sent back and forth! So it's possible to do, but with some minor delay! But, it would be awsome to see it happen!
As for FL it's only possible to make if you only use built in generators. Bah! That would've sucked! Might be a workaround... but, since this never has been tried, it's possible that it's not too hard either!

___________________
- Just be who you are...

KORG KARMA Music Workstation
Roland JP-8000
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quote:

Originally posted by The Drow I'm a programmer. I think that it is possible to be done easily with the system that some pepole suggested here (to transfer bits on every action)... You don't have to stream audio or pics. Think Simple thats what programming is all about.

It's not possible without Imageline (in FL's case) programming a new module. You're thinking too easy.
If it's a 3rd-party application, it'll be hard as hell. If it comes from the creators they have to rewrite large amout of their coding.
Could've been interesting to see what the FL crew has to say about this. I'll post it on FLstudio.com

___________________
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It's a real bedroom studio!

trust me.
a vst can act as a linker...
like rewire.

___________________
My tracks:
The Darkone - You Come With Power
The Darkone - Falling Stars Part 1 (Original Mix) *NEW*

quote:

Originally posted by Dickie-T you don't understand ALL THAT NEEDS TO BE TRANSFERRED OVER THE INTERNET ARE THE CHANGING OF VST SETTINGS (SIMPLE NUMBERS OF POT METERS) AND ADDING/REMOVING OF VST'S (ALSO SOME SIMPLE LINES) ETC ETC (VOLUME SETTINGS, NOTES ... ... ... )... It's just as if a .flp file is sent every 5 seconds or something, the actual cpu processing comes from the vst on the user's pc no audio needs to be transfered, only simple settings, dont u understand? also no graphics, just the two collaborating users each open fl on their own pc and the rest.. well duh

Dude, you're talking to an electrical engineer who's been doing software for 3 years. I understand that you may have a vision in your mind of how this should be done, but you're not accomplishing anything by flying off the handle and talking to me like I'm an idiot.

The point is, implementation is not always as easy as it sounds from the "big picture" point of view. The phrase we use in the software world is: anything's possible with enough money and development time. The question is whether or not it's worth it for these companies to commit to such an undertaking - it's a simple cost/benefit scenario, and as I said, there's simply not much demand for what you're suggesting, so why invest so many resources into it?

What YOU don't understand is that there's more to a track than "simple numbers of pot meters" and so on. Tracks have enormous amounts of automation and sysex data that all have to be transmitted on a MIDI clock with a resolution of something like 1/192. In order for the feature you're talking about to be useful to anyone, it would have support realtime playback and recording, so if I'm sitting in front of my keyboard twisting 5 or 6 knobs and playing some chords, the other person should be able to hear it in realtime. In order for this to work, ALL the MIDI data has to be transmitted during playback & recording.

Without realtime support, you might as well just be sending your project file back and forth on MSN. And incidentally, you may be used to small project files from using Fruityloops, but Cubase projects (I'm talking about JUST the .cpr file, not including images or peak files or clips or any other parts of the project) can easily go over 10 MB, and I can't even imagine how big an Ableton or ProTools project gets. So once again, the project data is not of a trivial size.

So maybe we'll say, okay, forget the whole project data, let's just transmit the MIDI clock and all event data. That works great assuming that the project actually has MIDI set up properly, which is almost never the case with a software-based studio and almost impossible using programs like FL Studio and Reason which don't even use MIDI for event handling.

And what about hardware instruments? You're still ignoring that. What if person A is doing a collab with person B and person A has a bunch of fancy hardware that person B doesn't? Is A just supposed to throw away that hardware? Or tell person B that he'll just have to imagine the way it sounds, because the collab architecture doesn't support it?

What about audio clips? Okay, again, if we ASSUME that person B has all of the exact same audio clips as person A, then we can just transmit data about when to cue them up. But how do we KNOW that person B has all the necessary clips, and how do we know that they are the correct versions? You'd need a complete version control system for this, which is a massive undertaking on its own! What if A added effects to some clip using Wavelab and re-imported it into the project - that ENTIRE CLIP would now have to be sent over to B in order to do what you're suggesting. If the clip is 32 bits and 30 seconds long, that's a 10 meg transfer we're talking about.

And what about multisamples, like those in Kontakt or HALion? Some of these are 100 megs, 500 megs, even 3 gigabytes long. How can we possibly verify that person B is using the exact same sample as person A - and if they aren't the same, how are we supposed to get them in sync? Send the entire 3 gig multisample?

And once again, are you ignoring licensing issues because you pirate all your software and instruments, or do you actually expect that all users in a collab project should pay for their own separate versions of every single plugin that every single other user has?

I'm intimately familiar with the KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) rule in both software development and music production, but there is such a thing as oversimplifying. If a company like Steinberg or Image-Line wanted to implement a feature like this, they'd have to implement it in a way that was guaranteed to work and produce repeatable results, otherwise the feature would be useless to everyone.

You can't simply make the assumption in a collab project that both people have everything they need in the correct versions. A collab system that made this assumption would be guaranteed to almost NEVER work correctly. It *is* possible to develop a collab system that doesn't use audio streaming, but that's not going to guarantee performance over a low-bandwidth connection - in many or most cases, it would require a lot MORE bandwidth.

So rather than kicking and screaming about how you know it's possible to do it the way you think it should be done, why don't you e-mail Steinberg or Imageline or any one of these companies and suggest it to them, and see what their reaction is.

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quote:

Originally posted by DigiNut Dude, you're talking to an electrical engineer who's been doing software for 3 years. I understand that you may have a vision in your mind of how this should be done, but you're not accomplishing anything by flying off the handle and talking to me like I'm an idiot.

lol sorry i got frustrated!

EDIT: and yes you are right i was thinking a bit narrow minded, but my idea was more for producer n00bs who want to have fun, you are talking about what pro's need and stuff

quote:

Originally posted by The Drow trust me. a vst can act as a linker... like rewire.

What do you mean by "linker"?
The way the sequencers are programmed now, it's not possible to realize any of the ideas in this thread right now.

DigiNut has said most of things worth saying about transferring data, but what he say about not transferring project files is a problem that is possible to solve. Let's say User A starts a new project and User B connects. Then the size is under 10kb. When they start working every little change is added to both users project, and if there is a difference they'll be compared and synced accordingly. I know there are some factors i'm not mentioning here, but it's possible to make workarounds for most problems that could occour.

___________________
- Just be who you are...

KORG KARMA Music Workstation
Roland JP-8000
SONY MDR-7506
ECHO MIA MIDI
STK VX-804FX console mixer
THX Audio ST-90 Studio monitors
It's a real bedroom studio!