The People's Republic of Groove

Before I began working on this article, who could have guessed that my next musical project would be an ocean-jumping collaboration with Ralf, a German electro-pop producer I met online? Community-based, German-run Digitalmusician.net tries to bring the dream of international collective music making to the masses through its multi-faceted website; in addition to a social/professional networking component — imagine an international eHarmony for musical collaborators — Digitalmusician.net (a.k.a. DMN) offers free software to simplify the online collaboration process. The website’s raison d’etre is to bring a world of musicians and producers to your computer — and make collaboration with them simple. How simple? That is the question.

Getting Started

DMN offers two types of accounts, Basic and Pro. Basic comes free of charge, and offers the user a Digitalmusician.net homepage with a photo, three demo tracks, and 50MB of server storage for audio created with DMN’s Digital Music Recorder software (more on this later).

The Pro account costs 9.90 euros a month (that’s about $13.23 as of publication, Yankee) and allows for two pics and five songs on the artist homepage. More importantly, the live interactive software you get access to when you sign up for the Pro account can utilize higher transfer rates for more professional quality when you’re jamming in real time (or near real time) with a collaborator. Since full-bandwidth uncompressed audio is too large to transmit in real time, the Pro account adds a Send File utility that allows the user to immediately transfer high-quality files to a collaborator. Additionally, the Pro account offers 150MB of online file storage per month for projects created with the Digital Music Recorder utility.

Both account types allow users to access and search all members’ homepages. The searches can contain keywords, which makes light work of finding specific types of players. There’s a mail utility that allows user to send messages, as well as a partner system, which is very similar to the MySpace “friends” paradigm. This allows you to add folks who share similar music interests, letting you create your own customized pool of talent for your projects. The homepage also contains a projects tab that allows users to post and search projects in order to find players. Budgets and copyright agreements may also be specified here.

The free downloadable PC and Mac-compatible software allows synchronized music streams between networked computers, as well as realtime audio and video communication. DMN offers three different versions, the most basic of which is Digital Music Messenger (DMM, not to be confused with Digitalmusician.net’s acronym, DMN). This is a PC or Mac plug-in that supports VST, Audio Units and RTAS-compatible audio software, i.e. Cubase, Logic, Performer, or Pro Tools. When two users instantiate the plug-in their audio software, they’re prompted to enter their usernames and passwords. Once they’re connected, they can hear playback from each other’s audio program in near real time, as well as send text messages and communicate via integrated audio and video chat. The next step up is the Digital Musician Link (DML) plug-in. This functions much like the DMM plug-in, but adds what Digitalmusician.net refers to as timestamp technology, allowing users to jam in synchronization. It also adds MIDI file transfers in real time. The downside is that DML only supports VST and RTAS, so Logic and DP users are out of luck (I wouldn’t attempt to get a plug-in of this complexity to work in a wrapper). Finally, DigitalMusician.net offers the Digital Music Recorder (DMR), which is a standalone 16-track audio recorder with a unique twist; audio data is automatically saved on the website’s servers, allowing access by other members. You can regulate access to these recordings, including the ability to buy or sell performances. DMR allows use of the lossless format for the best fidelity of any of the offered software, and makes use of ReWire for realtime connectivity with other online users.

Once you’ve completed the registration process, you can create your homepage with photos and MP3 demos; this is a requirement if you’d like your status to appear as Pro (you do have some flattering photos and great sounding demos, right?).

Making Friends, Making Music

With my homepage in place, I next browsed the talent and projects. As of publication, there are 2,185 artists listed on the site, with 385 located in the US and the rest mostly based in Europe. When you click on the Artists and Studios tab, all of the artists come listed with a photo, brief summary, and a tape transport to preview one of their demo tracks, so you can quickly get an idea what they’re about. The Projects tab displays artists seeking collaborators for one or more songs. Most of the projects use the Creative Commons license, which is a type of license that aims to minimize legal complications inherent to Internet information sharing; visit www.creativecommons.com for more.

I started by downloading Digital Music Messenger, the most basic plug-in version of the DMN software. The installation went smoothly. When I opened Apple Logic, DMM showed up in my plug-in library, but here was where things got a little sketchy. The documentation suggests that the plug-in be instantiated in a “master insert slot in your sequencer’s input channel.” Hmm . . . Logic doesn’t really have such a thing. I ended up calling a fellow Logic user, and had him set up his own DMN account. He installed DMM on his side, and after some major trial-and-error, we got things up and running. Logic frequently didn’t “hear” audio playing from the remote computer unless the user on the receiving end hit the play button, but once audio began to be received — i.e. Logic was “listening” — we were able to stop the transport without interrupting audio transmission. It was also necessary to experiment with the upstream rate and audio rate controls to minimize clicking and dropouts. With this resolved, I set up a microphone for realtime talkback, which worked perfectly.

Within a day or so of joining, I had already received e-mail on DMN from other musicians requesting me as a partner. I took the opportunity to request collaboration with a fellow from Germany who was a big vintage electropop fiend. My kinda people! He was enthusiastic, but had not made use of any of the DMM software yet. Via back-and-forth e-mail on the site, we decided that he could add some synths to a partially complete track of mine, and that we would “meet” at a specified time. This took a little planning, since Germany is nine hours ahead of California (perhaps DigitalMusician.net can whip up some software to negate time zone differences and alter the time/space continuum). My initial plan was to use the standalone DMR software, but when I imported a stereo audio file, it wouldn’t play properly; it stuttered and looped strangely, so I figured using the basic DMM plug would be the path of least resistance.

My partner across the globe was a Cubase user, so I predicted he would have an easier time setting things up than I did in Logic. Turns out he had as much trouble as I did, but once he discovered the Cubase/Nuendo video tutorials on the DigitalMusician.net site, things went far more smoothly for him. Once we were up and running, I was able to jam over a mix my partner played back from his end. He could hear me, but the timing was pretty compromised (and I don’t need any help playing off time!). But he could still get the idea of what I was doing, and with live audio and video feeds, it was easy to see how useful this could be. With a little more experimenting with my Logic input object, I figured out how to record the mix he was playing back into Logic on my side. This way I could lay down my bassline in proper time — I recommend putting down a bar of click track at the top of the track to ease lining things up. My partner was able to record his playing onto my tracks as well.

If you have a Pro account, you can use DigitalMusician.net’s Send File utility to transmit the full-bandwidth version of a track to your partner. Otherwise, you can send full-bandwidth files via email or upload to a separate server. If you upgrade to the Digital Music Link version of the plug-in, you can theoretically avoid timing issues, as DMN makes use of ReWire technology to make sure everything stays locked; however you’ll need a pretty serious internet connection to make this work. DMN recommends a dedicated ADSL port, and configuration can be hairy for those not well versed in networking; when attempting to connect with each other (and other DMN users) using the VST version of the DML plug-in instantiated in Ableton Live, associate editor Michael Gallant and editor at large Craig Anderton both found this to be true as well. The website does offer some tutorials on configuring your DSL modem/switcher, though.

Lessons

So what did I learn? First off, DMN needs better documentation. The included manuals are somewhat vague, and the video tutorials are great, but only apply to Cubase and Nuendo users, when what’s really needed are materials for all common audio platforms. As it stands, DMN can really only be used to its fullest by truly tech-savvy users. Additionally, I found audio quality to be a bit compromised in certain situations. The DMM plug-in compresses to MP3 on the fly, but in addition to the fidelity loss associated with MP3 compression, I heard a fair amount of pop and click-type degradation as well. I experienced this using standard speed DSL; faster connections will likely yield better fidelity. However, this can be worked around since the MP3s only function as temporary files when collaborating; both users are still recording full bandwidth audio into their DAW software, and the high-rez files can be forwarded after the session is over.

From a strictly social standpoint, it sure was neat to meet and interactively jam with a new friend on the other side of the world with similar influences. The DigitalMusician.net experience really made me feel like I was playing music with someone across the room as I listened to Ralf plink away on his synth in real time. Though the technology isn’t seamless, this experience was still amazing to behold. For the time being, it’s limited mostly to tech nerds like me, but one could imagine the technology maturing quickly, especially with rapidly improving connection speeds.

And speaking of tech nerds, this brings up another issue: Producer and programmer types are the best equipped to make use of this kind of bleeding-edge technology, ergo, DMN is dominated by producer and programmers connected with other producers and programmers. Surely there are other types of musicians in the community (a healthy contingent of singers and drummers, for example), but the site would better fulfill its goals with a more diverse roster of musicians. But as we’ve seen with apps such as Apple’s GarageBand, less computer-oriented musicians typically embrace technology when it’s easy to understand, and DigitalMusician.net can be challenging to configure. But if you’re a savvy user who doesn’t mind a little tweaking to get up to speed, DMN might just the portal you’ve been waiting for.