Splice: Myspace for musicians

Just out of beta, Splice is a burgeoning community of music producers and DJs that goes beyond the capabilities of a general networking site like Myspace or Facebook. It’s an online niche community with all kinds of Web 2.0 buzz-concepts including social networking, user-generated content, user-rated data, collaboration, online applications, AJAX and digital media.

After you join and create a profile, things start to diverge from a normal social networking site when it asks you to upload samples or record a sound directly on the site. There’s no place to upload your own music, and they warn that they’ll delete any pre-mixed tracks if they find them. Then you go browsing around the Sounds section and add samples you like to your case. Next, it’s over to the online sequencer application where you drop in the sounds you’ve found and get creative. When you’re done, you save your song and it shows up in your profile and under Songs. Heading over to the Songs section you can see the latest songs, the highest rated, discussed or similar. And there’s a Remix button under each that will load the track into the sampler so you can make modifications and save it as a new remix. You can also browse the other users in the People section, check out the latest competitions in Contests, or just hang out in the Forum.

Despite being a well-designed and good-looking site, it has a few drawbacks. While the sequencer application is pretty intuitive, it’s not nearly as full featured or as powerful as commercial software. And established digital musicians might prefer to work in their own software but due to the collaborative nature, it’s just not allowed. There’s also no way to add custom plugins or VSTs so you’re limited to what’s on board. Forget about any fancy beat slicing or advanced DSP like what’s possible in something like Max / MSP because the application is still fairly rudimentary. And there are a few bugs still floating around that are an annoyance.

Even with that in mind, Splice is a very cool community that allows musicians to collaborate online without the traditional barriers of owning software (and then making the file accessible to someone else with different software). It could potentially be used by higher-profile artists to allow a greater segment of people to remix their tracks and be an interesting marketing tool in that regard. And wouldn’t it be fun to let your grandma have a stab at remixing that new Dn’B track of yours?

Here’s my profile if you’re curious or want to add me: Quantazelle’s Splice profile