I had an idea:

What if there was a way to have an online "chat" style room where users could login and collaborate on songs in real-time- they could plug in their instruments and jam, right there, in real time.

There has to be a way....a way to convert analog inputs to digital (or just an analog transfer of the sounds into the computer), and then a way to hear all of those instruments online in one room simultaneously. There are already games that use similar technology like Everquest where multiple users can perform many actions at once.

Such a program would open the door for so many breakthrough collaborations.

Just an idea.

Z7

There is, or at least there was a few years back. A program called rockit, I test drove it about 6-7 years ago, so the technology has been around for a while. At the time it was midi stuff because the data rates etc. don't know if there is still something about, but I would have thought so.

Obviously the problem your always going to have with live audio is the latency (delay) so jamming isn't going to be smooth. I remember an article about the future sound of london using isdn back in the day to coloborate on their album, might be worth a quick google search about.

Well, something in the vein could be done non-real time as well. One person would post the drums, another one who's good at bass would provide that, a few others would contribute the keys and have somebody do a solo on some other instrument. That sort of thing. Just agree on the key and tempo in the beginning and the rest should be simple if everybody posted their submissions on seprate clips so the full song could be compiled and mixed on a sequencer program once everyone's parts woud have been submitted.

And if you need somebody to totally mess it up by driving it through seventeen distortion devices at once then I'm your man on that.

sounds cool if legalities don't enter in.

Legalities suck. I'm very tired of people in society getting so wrapped up in technicalities that they forget to live life. What ever happened to honesty and respect?

You're right, Tal. Somewhere along the line, some dude would falsely say that he owned the song and the big downhill snowball would start to grow.

Imperfection and dishonesty suck.

At least we here at the org musician's community aren't that way.

http://www.ninjam.com/

just for Linux though.