Saturday, July 21, 2007

With an emphasis on the "e"

This is either really cool or really scary.

4 comments:

the improvising guitarist said...

Yikes. Doesn’t sound like it would work in a ‘real world’ (real egos, real agendas, real deadlines and real budgets) situation.
I wonder if taking the model of open-source version control (e.g. CVS, Subversion) would be more successful (useable) than what appears to be a slightly more focussed version of a social networking site.

S, tig

Andrew Durkin said...

Hey, tig, thanks much for commenting, and for the tip on CVS, which I had never heard of.

I'm not sure what would be the easiest or most useable mechanism to allow for online collaboration by musicians, beyond old-fashioned email and FTP. I have been marginally interested in this area for a long time, since my own musical projects have tended to involve 1. lots of other people, who are often 2. people often spread out over great geographical distances.

In terms of eSession specifically, I don't see the point of having this all "housed" within some very cheesy site with a hardcore "studio-musician" vibe (in the pejorative sense of that term). It all seems to point toward a kind of assembly-line, mercenary approach to making music (after all, you can hire a Grammy (TM) winning engineer -- oooo, boy!).

I've always been a big fan of multitracking, and studio "fakery," and all that, so I'm not poo-pooing this on philosophical grounds (speaking of questions of authenticity). But the more I think about eSession, the more it seems plain old scary. Or at least annoying.

Anonymous said...

Ha, it's funny. I watched the opening Flash intro, and as soon as it said "setting up an FTP server" I said to myself "Pain in the ass"-- and then I saw those words stream in front of my eyes. Got a giggle out of it anyway.

Hey, if you need to transfer IJG stuff via FTP, lemme know (like the lossless background trax for Job Song and Big Ass Truck). I've got some space and can give you the coordinates.

Andrew Durkin said...

Hey-yo Jill-o:

Yeah! Let me know what you need. Did the version of BAT I sent work for you? If not, maybe we can talk FTP.