Wed 5 Jul 2006
DISCLAIMER: I’m not on the Mugshot team and don’t know what their plans are but with any open ended tool such as Mugshot others can find their own uses. Here are my thoughts on Mugshot’s potential.
One of the the things I heard a lot of at GUADEC being a Red Hat employee was, “what is mugshot?”. People are still wondering what it is for. I wish we had someone from the Mugshot team in attendance. Imagine people Web Swarming the slides or video streams and having a live persistent chat on a presentation as it was happening.
Most people who have used Mugshot will associate it directly with Web Swarming which right now is the major use case. It is however much more than that. From my point of view as a user who wants to use Mugshot in a specific way I see Mugshot as being broken down into a couple of parts. The first is live group notification (the web swarm) and the second is contextual live update data stores (the chat). The data stores are contextual because they are directly related to the notification.
Using these parts one could create collaborative apps that utilize the Mugshot network. One of the things brought up at GUADEC was networking Jokosher so a band could work on new songs or practice together even if they didn’t live close to each other (e.g. the Drooling Macaque Band). One of the central problems that needs to be solved for this to work is how do we publicize shared projects and how do we notify people when new tracks are added or edited?
Thinking in terms of Mugshot, this could be solved by bands creating groups. In this group they publish links to shared projects, similarly to how Web Swarms work. The group members would use the chat to store notes about the project and every time a track is added or modified Jokosher is notified. Not online at the time? Not a problem. Remember data is persistent on Mugshot so the next time you turn on Jokosher you would get all the update notifications.
Of course you would only want to send metadata over Mugshot. The actual tracks would have to be stored somewhere else. There are also numerous other issues to deal with before we have fully collaborative music editing but it is a piece of the puzzle.
So for all those who don’t understand what Mugshot is, perhaps it has just failed to touch on something you are interested in. Perhaps you just need to dream up what Mugshot should mean to you.
[read this post in: ar de es fr it ja ko pt ru zh-CN ]
July 5th, 2006 at 2:34 pm
We had fully collaborative music editing back in 1997 with the (sadly now defunct) Resrocket project. Log onto a central server up popped an irc chat window and a play sheet onto which people could add parts of the song. Each user could then mix it as they saw fit, ignore users who couldn’t play and create their own jams, in realtime, using the joys of midi.
While it would be a neat trick, I’d hate to see Jokosher get bogged down in this sort of bluesky thinking (along with other ideas they’ve had recently) before they get the basics working and working well.
July 6th, 2006 at 4:07 am
I attended a presentation in Paris a couple of years ago by researchers looking into the problem of people rehearsing and playing together on the web. It only worked halfway, the problem being that the delay caused by the web made it very very hard to play together as you where always a little out of sync.
July 6th, 2006 at 9:43 am
It is not about playing together in real time. It is about writing songs and practising with the people you would be playing live with somewhere else. Music is rarely made in realtime these days. With backing tracks, fill tracks, loops, samples and multitrack editors one can fiddle around with the music until they get the sound they want. Bring collaboration into this and you have a way of exploring a more diverse sound set. It beats passing around an mp3 and people just layering over it each time.
July 6th, 2006 at 9:45 am
Oh and BTW did you know to get reverb in the old days recording artists would pipe their vocals through phone lines to huge underground rooms in LA. The rooms consited of large speakers at one end and mics at the other which would loop the sound back to as far away as NY? Of course they had dedicated lines to do that stuff.
July 7th, 2006 at 3:35 am
To be honest, i still don’t get mugshot. I think it is some kind of web platform or connectivity thing for desktop apps? How is that different to XMPP (Jabber)?
Mugshot needs an example app (think “Basecamp” for Rails), so we can point fingers “that is mugshot”.
I understand RedHat doesn’t want to make it so specific and it should be a general thing. But selling (not in the money sense) general things is really hard.
July 9th, 2006 at 9:47 am
beza1e1,
“How is that different to XMPP (Jabber)?”
That is like saying “How is HTTP different from TCP/IP?” Mugshot is a layer above. It is an aplication platform as oposed to a protocol that enables application platforms. BTW Mugshot uses Jabber as its communications layer.