I developed a VST plugin that allows users to collaborate remotely using any DAW, it's called BeatConnect. The main value of this is that everyone can use their own setup and instruments and still participate in the creative process together. I've been working on this for a year and have been doing open beta for about a month, people seem really into it which is awesome!

4+ people can make music at the same time, the projects are saved and loaded in the cloud, people can load them on their own time if they want and do their parts so not everyone needs to be online at the same time. Tons of extra stuff, I'm quite proud of how it's turned out.

I built this mainly because all my friends who make music live in different cities and I really just want to jam all the time and nothing out there was letting me do it, so the idea was born a while ago but it was an adventure to get it to work properly.

Screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/Kr3bvx2.jpeg Website: www.beatconnect.ca

This is super cool! My band is a bit scattered geographically at the moment so this could actually really help us out.

I hope so! Give it a shot and let me know how it goes

Looks great, I was thinking about building the same thing earlier this year but couldn't find the time, so I'm glad this exists. Will you allow users to collaborate with strangers?

You can add anyone you want, for now you'll need to pass through our discord/reddit if you're looking to meet new people but the plan is to turn it into a collaboration hub so that you can find people based on their genre and skill (Hiphop + drummer, metal + singer, etc.) and just start playing.

BeatConnect is an effect that is placed on the master output and it will capture audio and place it in the shared sequencer window, sync'd with anyone else who's connected with you. Like google docs but for music. So its audio but this setup allows everyone to use their VSTs and instruments.

I've added some features that make it easy to quickly bring in pre-recorded material (like midi patterns or stuff in drum machines/step sequencers) so that you don't need to do an annoying stem render process.

Projects get saved to the cloud so they can be reloaded by anyone whenever, you don't necessarily have to be online at the same time to work on the track. Export to wav when finished, and you can drag samples from the plugin into your DAW as well if you want to do some special chopping or modifications. There's also a lot of silent treatment and processing of the audio to make sure no matter the gear people have, or the sample-rate they set, everyone hears the exact same audio without degradation.

Works with pretty much any DAW that supports VST3/AU, Logic/GB is fine as well as most of the big players on and pc and mac.

And yeah thanks, really excited to start sharing this and getting it out there, worked like a demon on this for almost a year now :)