“So who are you guys anyway?”
At the moment the description of Concert on our GitHub page reads “We build collaborative audio production tools”. Whilst perfectly accurate, we thought it only proper to introduce ourselves a bit more formally and explore what we mean by collaborative audio production in a bit more detail.
My name is Paul and I’ve teamed up with a longstanding colleague of mine, David, to build software for recording audio across the internet. We’re both professional software engineers with a keen interest in music technology. We’re accustomed to using well-established collaboration tools to work globally with other software engineers every day.
When writing software, we can see what changes other engineers have made, try them out for ourselves, make comments and check that everything is still working as expected — all in a natural workflow. When we worked on music projects, however, we found that there weren’t any tools that helped us work together so naturally. It’s not fun to save the latest 2 GB version of a project into DropBox several times a day! This got us thinking…
What if we could bring our software collaboration tools to our music production?
That’s when we decided to start work on Concert. In our spare time we started figuring out how to build a tool for distributed audio production. In this context “distributed” means that our audio production system is made of several components communicating and working together to record audio — quite unlike mainstream audio production systems today.
Building a distributed audio production system poses a huge engineering challenge, but it’s vital to providing the collaborative features that we want.
Our goal is to build a system that lets you:
- Control your audio production from multiple devices at once
- Invite other people into your recording sessions over the internet
- Let people see and hear the changes you’ve made to your project when they’re not connected.
Over the next couple of posts we’ll explore how being distributed helps us achieve each of those. We’ll also take a deep-dive into libadiff and explore how to work out what edits have been made to an audio file.
