New project: WebSession music collaboration system
Soyeah. This is in part just to knock that picture of Richard Stallman out of the top spot on my page; I am instituting a "no scaring children" policy on my blog and shall sink that picture post-haste. But it's still a cool project, which is why I'm throwing it out there right now.
Anyway. Senior project for college is coming around, and after a couple of abortive attempts (like what the Drupal AppBar guy did between me getting turned down for my Google Summer of Code project and getting back to work on it for school--agh!), I've settled on a project: a remote music collaboration system that, for now, I'm calling WebSession. WebSession is intended to bolt into digital audio workstations like Ableton Live or Adobe Audition and more easily allow musicians to do their thing over the interwebs.
The idea, for Windows and probably OS X at least (I'm sorry1, but Linux audio is an execrable pile of crap and I have no real interest in dealing with anything that's part of that ecosystem), are a pair of VSTs, written in C/C++, for jacking into the DAW and transmitting audio out to the client application, written in C#. The client application will be a Jabber client, although the server seems to require some extensions to do what we want it to do and I don't yet know quite how to tackle this. The idea is that you'll be able to listen in on any of the other musicians in your session as they play, and easily trade patches and MIDI sequences with other people in the session. Hopefully, if I'm on the right track, it'll make it a lot easier to work with other musicians who might not be right next door.
It'd be very cool if I could make the whole thing a ReWire master living on top of your DAW, but that'd be a serious hassle. And ReWire's one-way architecture wouldn't even work as a slave.
More when I actually have something out there to play with. Should be by the end of the year.
1 - I'm not sorry. It's their own damn fault. Pick! A! Solution!