University of West London Bachelor Project

Dear Audacity-community,

My name is Emanuel Knorr and I am a student of the University West London. I am living in Germany and since 2017 I am participating in a distance learning program of the UWL to become a Bachelor of Arts - Music Technology specialist. My group mates and me are now contacting you asking for some help for our current assessment.

Our current course is called „Future Media“ and my group mates and me are currently working on our last Assessment, which is described like this:

„Working in a self-selected group of 3 – 4 members you are required to devise, research and analyse a novel product in the area of digital entertainment, broadcasting or media distribution. The area that you present could be an artefact, an app, a startup, a distribution system, an Internet service or a technology, or indeed other relevant topics by specific arrangement with your lecturer.“

So in a nutshell we are asked to develop a new app that is somehow related to our studyies. We came up with the idea of creating a social network that is just meant to be used by musicians and producers and features useful tools for professional music producing. One of the main features is aimed to be an DAW integrated to the social media platform.

At the end of the day my group mates and I are just musicians and audio engineers, so we do not know too much about software design or computer science. In fact the assessment is just a theoretical approach we are not asked to hand in a detailed technical analysis but more of a pragmatic approach that is somehow inventive and useful in the professional music industry. But part of our assessment is to do some research on these topics and also to find out, how much it would approximately cost to hire a team of software developers to put our concept into praxis.

And at this point your DAW grabbed our attention since it is a high quality open source software that satisfies all our needs and even more.

To make our concept more clear here is the introduction to our work:

„Pro-cial media is aiming to connect social media with professional music producing.

Facebook and co are designed for general use. And even though they are not specifically designed for musical purposes, they are massively used by the music industry. But what would happen if there would be a social media platform intentionally designed for professionals of the music industry?

This is where Pro-cial gets interesting. Its aim is to connect the communication and socializing system of social media with useful tools for musicians and producers.

Though music producing is an individual process there are common working methods established today, that are generally used by most musicians and producers out there. Pro-cial media is aiming to integrate common tools for producing into the platform. Details will be explained throughout this work, but the most important features are the online DAW and the integrated job market for musicians and producers. „

Let me explain this a little.

The DAW is supposed to offer basic functions like e.g.:

- Audio/Midi recording/editing (upload -able)

- Use of basic Plug-In´s like EQ, Compressor, Reverb, Delay etc. (online)

- Paning, Volume adjustment, track muting/soloing (online)

In this case, online means that these thing shell be adjustable by anyone being part of the online-session in realtime. A session should be including up to 5 members that can communicate via voice chat while working on the session.

Uploadable means that the recording process takes place offline and that the file can be uploaded to the session afterwards. Realtime recording would probably not be possible using the online DAW. The uploader can also choose between different file formats. If the session is just a songwriting session, lossy audio formats such as Vorbis can be used, If the session also priors mixing then WAVE can be used.

I could probably talk endlessly about the concept but I hope that the idea is clear now.

Anyway, since your DAW is a open source software it should be possible to shrink it functions down to our needs, also to ensure better performance online. (I hope I got the meaning of open source right)

At this point we are working on the concept from a musicians/producers point of view. But we do not know, if our approach is somehow feasible. Also, we can not think of a budget to hire the needed labour and rent servers for using the modified DAW.

We would be really thankful if you, as experts, could give as a (short) comment on our concept including your personal opinion. Also some rough, estimated numbers on budget would be very useful for the assessment. At this point I also want to add that our work is just a theoretical approach and that we are currently not planning to really launch a project like this. But if we would really send a serious request to work on this project, would you maybe even be interested to cooperate with us?

I want to thank you in advance just for reading this mail and even more if you would send us some answers. As a young team of ambitious students any input from your side would be really helpful in the end.

Thank you for your time. We hope to hear from you soon.

Best,

Emanuel Knorr

PS: Please respond to [email protected] with the subject: Online DAW project - Audacity

Thank you so much in advance!

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