Good News / Bad News

Doctor: I have some good news and some bad news.
Patient: What’s the good news?
Doctor: The good news is they are naming a disease after you!

That’s a little how we feel this week. The good news is that the latest version of AudioOrchard is now live and you can check it out. And you should check it out. It’s pretty cool if we do say ourselves. There are lots of goodies in this release, but the far-and-away the biggest addition is effects. AudioOrchard now has EQ, Reverb, and Delay. There’s a lot more coming soon, so stay tuned. And, as always, please let us know what features you’d like to see added.

The bad news? AudioOrchard is going away! We’ve received the old “Cease and Desist” from the lawyers. Ok, ok, we’re not exactly going away… just the name is. From now on AudioOrchard will be know as <drumroll> um, we’re not sure yet. That’s where you come in. Let us know which of these names you’d be most likely to tell 1,000,000 of your closest friends about. Or, suggest something else. Really, we’re pretty open.

So What Is Audio Orchard?

We’re really excited about audioorchard.com. It’s taken quite a while to put all the pieces together, but finally having it live on the web (albeit in beta form) feels really good. But what is Audio Orchard?

When Audio Orchard was first conceived we started out by thinking about how cool it would be to be able to record music online. It seemed like there could be some nice benefits to being able to pull up the song you were working on from any computer in the world at any time, but that didn’t really seem like a compelling enough reason to use it over any number of the great DAW’s out there already.

The next question was “what could you do with on online DAW that you couldn’t do very well with the existing tools?” It didn’t take us very long to realize that the great websites that we all use every day are about connecting with people. Facebook, Twitter, even blogs are about connecting with others. As we thought about it we realized interacting with others is one of the most rewarding parts of playing music as well. It’s way more fun to make music with other people than by yourself. Playing by yourself is too much like practice. The really exciting part is taking a groove that one person created, and layering it with someone else’s harmonic ideas, and then putting someone else’s melody on top. That’s when music is at it’s best.

That’s what Audio Orchard is about. We don’t want to be just another DAW. We want to be the place you go to make music with other people online. Try it out. Go start a song and then invite someone else to collaborate. Spend some time at it. Bounce ideas off each other. Create something that’s better than either of you would have created by yourself.

That’s what we want Audio Orchard to be. We think it’s cool as it is today , but it’s not there yet. That’s where you come in. What would you like to see added to Audio Orchard? What would make it a better tool for making music? How can we enable you to have fun writing/recording music with other musicians?