When Splice set out to advance the music creation process, we aimed to recreate the collaborative studio experience: musicians in one room, seamlessly relaying music and discovering new ideas together.
Beta user Sicarii told us, “Projects die because [artists] don’t sustain communication and focus on projects. It’s a distance thing, because if you put us in the same room, we can tweak sounds for hours and hours.”
After feedback like that, we decided to revamp our project timeline – where it’s easier to work and collaborate on your terms. As Splice automatically backs up all your saves, you can now:
- share the saves you want your collaborators to see
- highlight the important saves while collapsing to hide the others
- attach audio previews for your reference
Collaboration Redefined
From our beta feedback sessions, Splice heard a few common problems from musicians:
- How do you best share a session file, along with ALL dependent files?
- How do you know if your collaborator has made a change to the project?
- How do you follow the progress of the project?
- How do you communicate with collaborators?
The problem is clear – collaboration is painful. Our solution is this two column view:
In the image above, the left column shows Brett’s private activity – saves that only he can see. At a certain point he decides to collaborate with Jon, a drummer, so he adds a comment and shares the save to right (the collaborator’s column), while adding Jon as a collaborator.
Jon then gets a notification and the project automatically syncs to his Splice folder. He can begin working on the project in his own private column. When Jon’s happy with his drums, he can just share the save back to Brett.
With Splice’s new project timelines, artists can understand, discuss, and play with each others’ work in one view.
Highlight Your Important Saves
Musicians have told us about their compulsive saving habits. In our previous timeline, it was difficult to highlight important saves among the dozens. Splice now allows you to highlight significant saves and add a descriptive comment.
In the graphic above, Jon saved and was happy with the bassline so he added a comment to highlight the save. After a few more saves, he added another comment when he liked the vocals. When Jon checks out his timeline later, he can clearly see the saves that he added as milestones – along with his comments why. The less important saves can still be viewed but are collapsed for easy navigation.
Listen to your Progress
It’s difficult to organize your project’s save history with audio previews and feedback every step of the way. We learned from beta users how helpful our timeline can be in keeping track of audio previews. Now in Splice, you can drag and drop an audio preview onto any save in your project timeline!
Upload an audio file to any save and highlight your progress. Listen to your project as it matures and share that audio with your collaborators, who can then comment with feedback.
That’s it for this “Beta Learnings” update! We will continue to keep you updated on our progress and look forward to letting more users off the waitlist. Your feedback is what helps us make Splice better.
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Keep following our blog and Facebook and Twitter for updates on beta. We hope to have you all in to use Splice soon!
December 4, 2013
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