Another problem with some of these sites is your track can be heard by everyone. This is great when you are looking for musicians to collaborate with, but not so cool if you are already working with a group. People can steal a cool riff or idea.

There are also very few sites that will allow you to upload .wav or .aiff files over 30meg or so, which depending on your bit rate is about a 3 minute WAV track.

I have also tried the real time online jamming and do to the latency their not much fun if you ask me. Some claim they have solved the latency problem, but I am not sure how they broke the laws of physics. Perhaps they transport you, now that would be worth paying for!

Currently I have been collaborating with a group on a site called Sarzar.com. We ended up on this site because there is no bull, and they allow uploads of .wav or .aiff file up to 100meg. The site also gives you a lot of storage for your sessions. I believe between the four of us we have something like 4gig. You can also hold completely private sessions, which is great because no one can see or hear your stuff, so you maintain control of your rights.

All in all, I think if you are looking just to have fun collaborating with new people, sites like Kompoz are cool. But if you are doing more serious online music collaboration I would check out Starzar.

It’s not solid yet, but you guys might find some new collaborative talent out there!

I imagine Ninjam is better though for serious recordings.

Cheers!

Jeremy, from the Opus Team
http://www.projectopus.com

However our collaboration explores a bit of a different twist: A two-way songwriting/recording collaboration followed by many remixes of a wider (and totally open) circle of friends from all over the place. In our case, we are thinking of remixing in a really broad production sense, giving tons of artistic liberty, change the chords, change any parts, add anything, change genres.

I look at this kind of remixing as sequential collaboration, which is another way of avoiding ego clashes, … eehm I mean perfectly reasonable disagreements between always rational fellow music makers :-), since many remixes create many outcomes/versions. You don’t like it, you remix it!

Some remixes end up being better than the “original”, most are at least interesting different takes on a song. I can highly recommend it , remixing as well as being remixed. It’s a total rush!

If you’re curious, the link under my name leads to this collaboration project “a minor theory” (or google for it), however be warned: it’s likely way too synth-pop for your ears! Then again you could fix that through a crunchy 6 guitar remix! :-)

For our original two-way collaboration we use an internal wiki for some of our work. It’s especially useful for lyrics collaboration, since a decent wiki keeps track of versions, so you never really loose a good idea, because it still exists in previous versions. In other ways, we operate similarly to your collab: FTP server, email (mp3’s for drafts, wav and/or midi for tracks to be used in the productions. However, instead of using click tracks at the beginning of our audio files, we just have the convention, that wav files always start at a bar boundary.

For us, I’m not gonna say who the chief squabbler is . . . could it be me? Could it?

Obviously enough, Des is our technical genius, and personally, I’d prefer if Des or Rob mixed all our tracks.

About the egos, it helps a lot that we’ve all played in bands before. We know to expect the occasional prima donna moments, and just roll with them.

And if I had to give just one suggestion: Make sure you put a person in charge of the mix *ahead* of time, so everyone agrees that person has final say. Then there’s no squabbling when differences do arise. (And they will :-|)