Desk Monkeys have gotten used to autosaved text. But electronic music producers are out of luck if their MacBook dies in the middle of an inspired recording sesh. That's a problem programmer Steve Martocci was focused on fixing when he coded Splice, a tool that can back up musicians' files to the cloud. He threw in some social features just before its October 2013 private beta release, and the EDM community latched on fast: They started using social add-ons to make Splice into a sort of GitHub for DJs, where artists build and branch off tracks together, like programmers do when they collaborate on code.
Martocci answered their enthusiasm, building more coworking tools. “The concept is genius—you can see the plug-ins other artists are using and modify any available session,” says Lemuel Dufez of DJ duo Alesia, who used to export files track by track and share them with collaborators via email. But when Alesia opened its music to the Splice community, 100 producers made remixes without a single file transfer.
Splice started out in electronica and hip hop, but Martocci sees it working for all digitally edited tunes. “That's just about everything these days,” he says. Martocci is adapting Splice for other kinds of audio workstations, and Alesia's Dufez is also hoping for live updating, so two users can work on the same track at the same time. Keep an ear out for the results at your next concert.
