Crumpled Notebook

I’ve been using Jamglue for almost a couple of months now (actually 92 days according to my
profile). I’m very comfortable with the site and the mixer and have found it a great way to kill time, while expressing myself creatively on occasion. Today I received an email from Splice updating me on their latest happenings and recent (or soon to be) changes. I probably signed up for Splice well before being introduced to Jamglue, but had never really used it much. I couldn’t quiet figure their “sequencer” out the first time I tried to use it. Not that it was hard to use (as I later discovered), but it wasn’t simple enough for me to figure out in about 2 minutes, which is all I had time for at that particular moment. Tonight I decided to give Splice another try. There are a lot of users and songs and sounds on Splice, so it couldn’t be all bad. Besides, now that Jamglue had awakened my long buried interest in music, I didn’t really care what site I used to create stuff, I just wanted to use the best one. Of course, I have my favorites when it comes to programs and web apps, etc…but in general, I’m fairly open to trying out new things. Creating a mix on Splice took me a few tries. It would have been helpful had I watched this excellent tutorial on YouTube first. I did figure it out myself without too much frustration though.

Both the Splice mixer and the Jamglue mixer offer a lot of the same features including: bpm setting, volume and pan adjustment slider, solo, mute, delete, and dragging clips. You get the idea. The first thing I noticed about the Splice mixer though was the sound recorder. This is a pretty major feature lacking from Jamglue I believe. Yes, most of us have Audacity, or can get it or something like it easily enough, but if you’re just trying something out, who wants to download software you are only going to use a couple of times? And forget about using Windows built in Sound Recorder! While I had never thought much about the lack of Jamglue having a sound recorder until today, I would say that is an added bonus to Splice. It is also a little easier to duplicate and remove sound clips in splice as well. All you do is select the clip and press the + (duplicate) or delete button to do this. In Jamglue you have to right click and select duplicate or remove. While not a huge complaint of mine, if you are duplicating several clips it can be a bit redundant. However, what Jamglue has to offer I think exceeds any edge Splice may have with the sound recorder and easier duplication. The mixer in general seems easier to use. It’s bigger and unlike Splice, gives you a zoom button which is helpful when adjusting tracks to be exactly where you want them so they match the beat. This is especially helpful when you split the tracks up and need to adjust the length of the clip–2 major things that can’t be done in Splice (to my limited knowledge). Splitting a track up is imperative to any web mixing software. Without this feature you may as well download Audacity and do all your mixing from there and then upload to the web. Not to say you shouldn’t download it anyway, it’s a great desktop sound editor. The second part of that is just as important–being able to shorten tracks by moving the beginning or end of the clip left or right. By doing this, once you find the segment you want (say of a George W. Bush speech), you can duplicate just that segment as many times as you want throughout your mix. Some more added bonuses to Jamglue is the ability to see what tracks make up a mix without having to go into the mixer itself and the new “beat matcher” feature which will match your tracks up to the same beat, without you having to manually do it. I’m also pretty sure you can’t adjust the BPM of just one track in Splice, whereas in Jamglue, you can. Jamglue also lets you import audio from Youtube or from any .mp3 or .wav URLs. What I would like to see on both sites would be the ability to highlight sections and delete like that, or copy and paste, etc…but I’m not a computer programmer and realize that may be harder to accomplish with the flash players, etc… I think both sites do a good job of promoting the idea behind Creative Commons and both appear to be good social networking sites. However, Jamglue seems to be a little easier to use, and gives the creator of the mix more control in how it is put together. I created the same mix on both sites, one just a little slower tempo than the other, from a couple of clips from another Splice user. Give them a listen. And if music is in your blood, or you’re just curious, create your own. My recommendation and vote for best online music mixing site is Jamglue, but give it a shot and see for yourself.

Tags: audacity, jamglue, mixer, splice_music