Indaba Music

Last week I wrote about online collaboration of musicians and how it would be nice if there was some kind of a internet database for hobbyist musicians where songwriters could search and ask musicians to play for their projects.

This week I actually found out that there is a service called Indaba Music (Indaba being a Zulu word for community and collaboration). Inbada Music does pretty much everything I wrote about earlier. It basically allows musicians from different geological places to find each other and create music online. Musicians can create their own profiles like in every other social networking community, in addition they can hire each other and create jam sessions. Indaba Music has its own Java-based digital audio workstation called Mantis, which is ideal for those who don't have their own recording software. To record a track user just has to sign in, plug in microphone and push the record button.

Members of a jam session can then upload their own tracks and download the tracks of other players, as well as mix and edit the tracks online with Mantis. Indaba also supports feedthrough: The music player displays a song or a track in waveform and people can comment along the waveform in order to refer to specific moments in time. The jam session owners can decide which type of players they want in their session, e.g. which instruments they want to use in their sessions, what kind of a players do they need and do they want to use paid musicians only. Indaba members can communicate through messages, chat, discussion lists and Indaba hosted conference calls.

Sources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indaba_Music

http://www.indabamusic.com/