[Draft discussion] Asynchronous collaboration

The feature has 4 votes but it is orphan. Does anyone want to adopt it?

Meanwhile…

The Bitwig team clearly has thought about this feature. In fact, they were (probably) the ones mentioning it:

Collaboration features are planned for future versions of Bitwig Studio. Network support is already built into the core of the software and the Bitwig Studio project file format is designed bearing collaboration features in mind. So collaboration is part of the DNA of Bitwig Studio. We are dedicated to further develop our own collaboration technology.

See also:

A video of Ohm Studio showing theor take on network collaboration.

Anyone interested in working on this proposal? I have sympathy for it and we can… collaborate (pun intended) in getting this draft ready.

There are two different use cases for “network collaboration”, and I think we should focus in one at a time:

  • real-time collaboration
  • asynchronous collaboration

I’m going to take this request with its four votes and I am going to propose that we focus on the asynchronous collaboration first. I see this as git but applied to music production, where the projects and their resources can be shared and synced, but also forked, and “patches” can be proposed, accepted or rejected. This git approach would also allow for peer-to-peer or mesh collaboration without needing a central server.

I bet there is a public for this. Leaving aside the real-time aspect would make it more flexible for collaboration (no need to meet at the same time) and less demanding in terms of performance.

Also, has anyone tried this?

Thanks for getting into this. I always had difficulties to imagine such thing. (It didn’t get my vote yet). The Git idea would make sense, absolutely. We can’t use git, as the .bwpreset format isn’t text based. Thus Bitwig would have to deliver something like that. I would actually oppose to realtime in the sense of jamming together. There are some tools out there, but because of the unavoidable latencies each party listens to something different and the tools are there already. Thats jamming not collaborating…
But two musicians sitting at abroad places running the same session and transfering their tracks fast into an already open session could make sense. One plays his guitar into the session, then the singer adds his voice. One after another… It would be certainly faster than travelling to a studio just to record all at once… Only some production workflows do that anyway, even if they are at the same place…

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Thank you @Tj_Shredder . Yes, I meant git-like but not literally git. I have made a first attempt to explain how this could work. It’s very rough and I’m sure that there are many details missing.

There would need wayyyy more votes on this, that would be a killer feature, with the still threatening pandemic, and more generally with this network communication era we’re in…

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I have polished the description. In my opinion this is good to go and be promoted to #features. Feedback welcome!