Soundation's online DAW has been enabling people to make music on their browsers for several years now, but now it has a major new feature: real-time collaboration.
Known as Collab Live, this promises seamless online collaboration with other musicians - something that’s very much in demand right now - removing the need to manually sync projects. The technology also enables live streams and webinars, and could be used by artists who want to offer their fans a chance to work on projects.
“Every move you make in Collab Live is synced in real-time and 100% seamless,” says Adam Hasslert, CEO of Soundation. “It’s basically like Google Docs for music production, but even more collaborative as you can see other co-creators’ cursors, what they are working on and every action they make in the studio, as they make it. We are the first music creation service to take collaboration to this level.”
Having tried Collab Live, we can confirm that it does work pretty much as outlined above: simply invite people to a project and you can work together on it. The downside is that Soundation remains pretty rudimentary in comparison to your ‘offline’ DAW - you can’t use your favourite plugins, for example - but both MIDI and audio tracks are supported, and there are a number of built-in instruments.
A built-in chat feature would be nice, as would a few more audio/MIDI export options so that projects can be worked on in other DAWs, but if you want a simple way to record a song with someone remotely, Soundation is definitely fit for purpose.
Collab Live is available as an open beta as of today. Those with free accounts are limited to one collaboration project at a time - there are two paid tiers that grant you more features and functionality, such as audio import/recording, MIDI controller support and high-quality WAV export - but you can try it right now. There’s also a Soundation Discord server that’s designed to help you to find collaborators, communicate with them, create groups and more.
Find out more on the Soundation website.
