watmm idea thing

I'm sure pretty much every musician here has a shit ton of abandoned projects and throw away stuff that they either periodically delete of leave to die in a buried folder somewhere. I probably have something like 200 right now.

Some are saved just for a drum loop I liked and others may just be a nice little chord sequence or cool synth patch.
I've often thought about breaking down all of these half started tracks into individual stems with the plan of drawing upon it in the future like a sample library. I think quite a lot of people probably already do this.

I was thinking that it would be really neat to have a watmm server that we could all upload such stems to. We could all continuously add to it and draw from it. A kind of watmm sample library/stem repository type thing.

Call me a stupid cunt but I was wondering if anything like this had been tried already or if it could even work in practice.
Seems to me like a really nice kind of collaboration between members that makes good use of material that is otherwise wasted.

I would really enjoy making something from other members throw away stuff and feel a lot better about putting my own throw aways in a potentially creative space instead of the trash.

There doesn't seem to be anywhere near enough collaboration between members here but this feels to me like a nice roundabout kinda way of doing that.

I think this is a great idea. Like a musical charity shop. 

  On 12/6/2016 at 2:21 PM, sweepstakes said:

I think this is a great idea. Like a musical charity shop. 

think of it more like recycling

could do version control if people know git

The repository would probably be huge though. And I doubt anyone wants to download the whole thing anyway.

Would be cool to have a system where you upload your files, and they get transcoded (like soundcloud or bandcamp, etc.) so that the mp3 version can be streamed. You find some you like, you put them in your cart, and it generates a ZIP for you, containing the WAVs.

Would also be cool to provide sysex or other source data (like Nord Modular patches) so that if you find something you like but it's a little off, you can go tweak it. And that could be included in the ZIP if you check that option, etc.

I can't make this happen btw. I can happily dump a ton of stuff into it but I wouldn't have the know how or resources to set it up.

  On 12/6/2016 at 2:58 PM, Mesh Gear Fox said:

yeah i like this idea too, in general a 'watmm sample library' would be really cool. lots of people have synths and stuff lying around that they could sample

I'm more fond of the idea of stem repository type thing rather than traditional sample library. So it feels a little more like remixing eachother. What I mean is that I wouldn't want to see it filled with individual drum hits for example. That would make it very bland and kinda pointless for me. Everyone has that stuff already to extremes.

sounds like a nice idea, ask joypapa if is possible to integrate it with the site maybe? I don't have that much to contribute though

Wasn't there a decent thread full of samples and such, just like y'all taking about? That could be a good place to start pulling from.

I guess it would be extremely heavy on online storage. The only other way that springs to mind would be if it were done in volumes and torrented? Not ideal.

I doubt there's a free solution.

The word 'samples' must be banned from this thread now. It has all the wrong connotations. If you break this rule I will touch you inappropriately.

I like how freesound does it, though, where there's one-shots, loops, jams, and hour-long field recordings. Come to think of it, what would this have over freesound?

  On 12/6/2016 at 3:33 PM, sweepstakes said:

I like how freesound does it, though, where there's one-shots, loops, jams, and hour-long field recordings. Come to think of it, what would this have over freesound?

I don't know about freesound but this would be material exclusively from watmm members. That's what interests me.

It looks like the Freesound API is actually quite in-depth. So something could be built using freesound just for storage and finding samples. 

  Quote

You can find similar sounds to a given target (based on content analysis) and retrieve automatically extracted features from audio files, as well as perform advanced queries combining content analysis features and other metadata (tags, etc...). With the Freesound API, you can also upload, comment, rate and bookmark sounds!

If you're curious about the gory technical details:

https://www.freesound.org/docs/api/

Here's the section for downloads:

https://www.freesound.org/docs/api/resources_apiv2.html#download-sound-oauth2-required

Of course if we want this to be WATMM official there would be work from Joyrex et al in setting up auth tokens, etc. to connect WATMM to freesound.

Maybe a far smaller scale experiment first? just to see if anyone bothers with it.

Small scale experiment could be just tagging freesound uploads as #watmm. Anyone interested could do a dump of like 5-10 stems, and if anyone actually uses them they can just link to them in their YLC upload.

I will definitely investigate this. Nice idea.

Just want to throw my support in the ring for whatever shape this takes - I have hundreds of half-formed songs/melodies/loops that I'd be more than happy to contribute.

I like this idea as well, but here are my concerns:

Storage - without increasing server/hosting costs, our storage for something like this may get out of hand, and unlike the downloads, this could grow much faster as people would be adding any bits and bobs they thought useful.

Control - I would like to keep it on or connected to WATMM, so we can provide it as a resource and not have folks from the outside raiding our bandwidth/resources.

We could create a section in the Downloads module for this - let me see if I can set it up so it only shows for the EKT forums or as a sub-forum of some sort...

  On 12/6/2016 at 6:27 PM, Joyrex said:

I like this idea as well, but here are my concerns:

 

Storage - without increasing server/hosting costs, our storage for something like this may get out of hand, and unlike the downloads, this could grow much faster as people would be adding any bits and bobs they thought useful.

 

Control - I would like to keep it on or connected to WATMM, so we can provide it as a resource and not have folks from the outside raiding our bandwidth/resources.

 

We could create a section in the Downloads module for this - let me see if I can set it up so it only shows for the EKT forums or as a sub-forum of some sort...

Awesome! Thank you.

I would contribute

Have 400+ shitty scetches

Great idea.

i reserve the right to murder anyone who mangles any of my shit into lofi house

another option would be to use some kind of sync software, this for example: https://www.resilio.com/individuals/

  On 12/6/2016 at 8:44 PM, caze said:

another option would be to use some kind of sync software, this for example: https://www.resilio.com/individuals/

Interesting! Although that appears to be from device-to-device, not from a website...