This is so cool. Can't wait to hear what kind of cool stuff comes out of this. Hey @decktonic, Does Blend allow for collaboration on projects with multiple DAWs (e.g. Logic & Ableton on the same project)?

@playswithfood I'd love to try this out with @alexbaldwin! Do you have any invite codes to spare? Edit: Applied for a membership code through the site too, in case the wait is short and I don't need to use up anyone's invites)

Thanks @decktonic! Actually just got my invite email, so I just used that. I'm looking forward to checking it out this weekend. How do you think Blend.io stands out from other music & music collab sites? How do you handle (or plan to handle) merges or editing different parts of the same file at once? I'd love a button to sync to SoundCloud (or let you scrape my "following" list there) to automatically follow on Blend those artists I already follow on SoundCloud. Same with artists I've "like"d on Facebook.

@decktonic Thanks for the quick response! Agreed about staying out of people's way. I think what I'm getting at is I'd be worried that the following happens: * I save a "song1" project and invite a friend to add some layers to the beat while I keep working on the vocals. * We're both working on the project at once now * If I save my version of the mix/project, he'll overwrite my changes when he saves. If he saves first, I'll overwrite his changes. Then we're relegated to Ye Olden Days' method of saving as a copy every time: "song1_final.wav", "song1_final2.wav", "song1_final_final.wav" etc. I suppose an alternative would be only working on individual pieces then having one person do the mix. But am I missing something?

Ohhhh I see. So it's not really about collaboration on a single project, it's more like an "open source" publishing platform that encourages remixes and re-use of components?

Probably one of my favorite companies of all time. Share your guitar solo and someone else can pick it up and add their drum beat to it. Possibilities are endless here and real collaboration on music creation without unnecessary consideration of geographical location is possible. Coolest thing is imagining how this will help musicians unlock new ways to monetize their efforts. David Bowie can now sell the component parts of "Let's Dance" and people can remix with their own vocals, etc. (not that anything could ever beat David's melodic voice on that masterpiece).

Hi @staringispolite! If you would like to sign up right away you can use my invite code DECKTONIC Thanks for the feedback everyone. If anyone has any questions I would be happy to answer them :) - Christian Montoya, product manager, Blend

Hi Jonathan, To your first question, one of the philosophies behind Blend is that we do not want musicians to abandon their favorite music production software. Our aim is to support all the major digital audio workstations (we already support Ableton Live, Maschine, Pro Tools, Logic, Garageband, and FL Studio) and to interface with the file formats for these as well as possible. We also don't want this to feel like code management or version management software. Music is a very creative, free-flowing process and it's hard to put that into an box, so we don't want musicians to feel like they have to manage a complex set of versions and file backups and so on. And fortunately for us, the software we support does a good job of making merges simple while also discouraging destructive project updates. So users can already take different versions of a project from different artists and merge them together in their DAW of choice, with all the relevant files and samples available from Blend in just one click. That Soundcloud / Facebook integration sounds cool, I'll definitely add it to my roadmap :) - Christian Montoya, product manager, Blend

Hi @staringispolite, that's definitely not how Blend works. When you 'pull' a project, you get your own local copy in your Dropbox. Working on that won't affect any other copies other users have. When you publish your copy, that creates a fresh project on Blend, linked back to the user that you pulled from. This way, projects have a full lineage with attribution, and each artist's version can be pulled and updated independently. This is a cool project that went through multiple revisions from different people, with a full lineage that you can trace back to the source: https://blend.io/project/52a6e74... Hope that helps! - Christian Montoya, product manager, Blend

@staringispolite that's a fair assessment. the way we link the projects together makes it all part of the same 'lineage,' but each update is a project in its own right. @lylemckeany we currently encourage musicians to publish projects in multiple formats if possible. The various DAWs don't really play together, but the project folders include all the stems, samples and MIDI data, so it is possible to transfer everything into your DAW of choice and work it. We have some projects already where musicians have done this. And we are working on more ways to streamline the workflow between different DAWs. - Christian Montoya, product manager, Blend

I discovered Blend during a mooc on Coursera, from berkeley music school, teacher was Erin barra. Here my link with my 3 first assignments from the course : https://blend.io/raseliche

I encourage any producer to engage into those free courses, not only you will eventually learn things, but it will give you the strength and the motivation to produce tracks for the assignments (with deadlines, peer reviews with other students an all, etc.), well this helpt me finding motivation and discovering Blend, a really good product.

Pros:

Backup projects, cool community giving help and advices, a nice interface with even an app. Platform for musicians, to share with musicians

Cons:

I only see pros using blend, never encountered any drawbacks

Blend supports FL Studio now too which is great! They're supporting more plugins as well so collaboration will be even more seamless as more content is added.

Awesome. Thanks @decktonic!

This is dope.

I second that.