Online Music Collaboration Software

While we're still in the infancy of online music collaboration, we've advanced technologically since the days of mailing tapes and files on CD-R back and forth via The Postal Service. Now there are plenty of faster delivery methods, including email, ftp, DigiDelivery [now by Aspera, formerly Avid/Digidesign] and free file hosting services, such as YouSendIt and MediaFire.

Still, there's nothing like jamming in real time.

Although there have been some innovative but failed online music collaboration attempts, like RocketNetwork and MyVirtualBand, there is no doubt the future will bring high-quality options for musicians to jam, record and perform live across the Internet with hi-def video conferencing.

In the meantime, let's check out three new and upcoming online music collaboration tools:

eJamming AUDiiO is a cross-platform app that allows musicians to play together over any broadband connection. Latency is determined by many factors, including Internet connection speed and the distance between the users.



Sessions can be recorded in CD-quality. eJamming’s Overdub mode allows the musician recording a new track to experience near-zero latency while everyone else in the session hears the new tracks synced to the previously recorded tracks.



eJamming is completely free now during the public beta period. After this initial period, the software is exprected to remain free to download, but you will have to pay a monthly subscription fee (probably about $10) to use it. Soon a new Jamcast feature will be added that allows streaming of live concert performances as well.



NINJAM [Novel Interval-based Network Jamming Architecture for Music] is a cross-platform program that uses OGG Vorbis audio compression to compress the audio, then streams it to a NINJAM server, which in turn streams it to the other people in your jam. Users can control their own personal mix.


The NINJAM solution to the latency problem of Internet streaming is to lengthen the delay to intervals measured in measures. Just as your interval finishes recording, it begins playing on everyone else's client. So when you play through an interval, you're playing along with the previous interval of everybody else, and they're playing along with your previous interval.

An alpha version for OS X is available here.


Bitwaves MusicBeam is an AU/VST plugin with near-real-time performance across various sequencers and platforms using Java. It's been tested with Logic Audio 5.5 (PC), Logic Pro 6.3-8 (Mac), Garage Band 3, Ableton Live 6.0 (Mac/PC), Digital Performer 5.0, and Mackie Tracktion 2. Available Q3 2008.



Real-time open source music for geographically-challenged musicians is becoming a reality.