node.js ko
Loopon
Loopon
by Sponoders
Loopon uses a simple approach to making music with your friends or even strangers. Drag and drop to your hearts content. You have full control over what you hear, and when you hear it. Don’t like that beat there, move it, or remove it. This is the ultimate way to make music with anyone in real-time over the Internet. Try Loopon now.
Judging Instructions
A modern browser will have the best performance and experience. Use Chrome stable, beta and dev versions aren’t supported with Socket.io v0.7.x. Also if you have flash blocked, to be able to hear anything, you need to have it enabled or unblocked for our app.
Everyone that connects starts out with a guest account. This allows them to interact with the site and make rooms. When creating a room, you can then start to make music and/or chat with fellow users.
The main interaction is to make music by dragging and dropping samples onto the music tracker grid. The music plays from top to bottom, with an infinite track grid continually expanding as you place samples on the tracker.
Every sample that is placed is synced in near real time with any other users in the same room. This allows you to work with multiple people on the same song, but at your own pace, and you have control over when the music actually plays.
You can Play, Pause, Stop, and Mute the tracker, allowing you to control your audio experience. As someone adds a sample to the tracker, it will play that sample in time as you would expect.
Some caveats, only the most recent rooms appear in the rooms list, so if you created one a while ago, and cannot find it, it still exists, you just have to go there manually with the url.
Sometimes an event doesn’t make it to your client, or that you do something and you don’t see the visual action that you should, don’t worry because it most likely did do what you wanted. Just refresh the page and you will see what you intended to do.
Who
chapel — Spokane, Washington
sorensen — Omaha, NE
niftylettuce — State College, PA
How
Server:
Browser:
Hosting:
Design/Inspiration:
We really enjoyed the design of Github for Mac and used it as a reference for how we designed the app.
Sounds:
The sounds came from one place: Sampleswap.org
Votes
Your Vote
Voting is now closed.
Other Votes
(45)
guybrush
contestant
jacobquistjudge
robhawkesjudgeI like the idea of collaborative music creation. Unfortunately I couldn’t scroll through the available rooms and no one else seemed to be online either. Still, an interesting concept that I’d like to see pursued further.
ricardrobin
contestantThis app is totally cool ! Well executed, good interaction, …
Love the github mac -like interface !
therazorbladejudgeThis is the most usable of the music entries (Eight Bit Beats and KO8080). Finally an easy way to try and assemble a tune. I would love to see a paint tool added. Graphics can use some designer love but the menu is nice.
- contestant
Thanks Eran! The paint tool sounds great, we’ve also considered mapping instruments to the keyboard :) Glad you enjoyed our entry.
dapsaysjudgeCool idea, and well done. I think it would help to have more explicit interaction among users (like having it show up when people chat); as it was, I often saw that people were modifying the music but I didn’t know who they were or what they were doing.
andrewfchenjudgeQuite impressed. Innovative way to make music. Functionality is simple and clear for the user. Really like the automatic look and automatic extension of the music making space.
- contestant
Wow-za'!! Thanks Andrew! We tried to keep it as simple as possible — and we have much work to do ahead of NKO to improve it by 10010 percent!
maraksquiresjudgeSweet looping interface. Overall a solid project for 48 hours, but there were some UI bugs when adding / removing sounds.
The site design also tends to hide the social interaction that are happening. It would have been nice for the chat room / currently connected users to be more viewable while making beats.
ryanmcgrath
judgeThe design and execution are overall very solid, and I had a fun experience while using it. Only gripe on design was the buttons and the black text, feels… incomplete there.
I dock it a bit on innovation as I’ve seen at least one or two Node projects already doing something like this, but otherwise thumbs up, nice job.
mikealjudgeI’m not hearing any sound.
14.0.835.122 beta
- contestant
If you have flash blocked, then it won’t work. Due to issues with HTML5 audio api and playback, we just went with flash to have it work.
- contestant
Could you please retest it with flash support?
- contestant
To second Chapel’s reply, I’ve tested it locally in Chrome Beta and there appears to be a bug (http://i.imgur.com/nCULD.png). Can you please test it in Firefox or a more stable build? We’d love for you to get it to work, as it’s boat loads of fun! :) Let us know! Thank Mikeal.
dGoligorskyjudgeThe Rooms idea is nice. Didn’t get a chance to interact with other people in the room. Sometimes noise-making is better done alone, y'know? I’ve been around a lot of people playing synths and having an amazing time while everyone around them is looking for a way to escape.
Feel like there’s an opportunity to break up the library into the different categories in more ways than color. Seems cluttered and could use a new row for a new type of sample. Plenty of room to gussy up the look of the sample tokens. The icons on the left (“rooms,” “new room,” etc.) are clean and intuitive. I wasn’t able to delete the samples from the board initially, but it seemed to work after refreshing the page and going to a different room. Probably doesn’t need a “close” button on the sample. You could have each box on the board be a button and just assign the sample to that button, then turn the buttons on and off. As it is, I’d like to be able to move several tokens at a time. Do you need to chat about the music? I feel like interacting over the sound is better than having a conversation. “Do” is generally more compelling than “say.” I like that I can play the samples in the library while the sequencer is going. I wish I could export the samples. Think about the journey- someone starts a room, then gives up their creation? What if there were some period while the creator builds something worth sharing before opening it up to collaboration? How could you show a collaborator that you like their changes (or don’t like their changes?) I’ve seen some interesting sound generators and sequencers that turn the process into a story in really fun and compelling ways and I’m still looking for the nugget that makes this something I’d want to share. What will this program change about the way I think about sequencers? Every act of design is kind of an act of destruction… what have you destroyed that makes this embodiment better than what came before it. How does it reference or build on what already exists? Great start and hope there’s some helpful feedback in here. Thanks!
ethan_andersonjudgeAmazingly full-featured for 48 hours!! It’s a pretty cool concept to create music with friends, and the room idea is clever. The interface is intuitive, and it seems to work as you’d expect.
- contestant
Thank you for the feedback. I am glad you enjoyed it, we thoroughly enjoyed making it.
samanthaquistjudgeGood idea and fun to play with. The drag/drop functionality is nice and makes it easy to use. I love how quick it is to start making music, how intuitive the drag/drop/x functions are, how you can change tunes mid-tune, how an account isn’t required to start playing, and how chat works. In terms of suggestions, I’m a little unclear about the permissions associated with the rooms, the columns' functionality, the homepage isn’t as enticing as it could be, and I had to refresh several times. But nice job overall, this is on its way to being pretty sweet.
- contestant
Thank you for the great feedback. We had a blast making it, and are going to continue to work on it after the contest mostly because we have got such great feedback and interest.
mbleigh
contestantI really like the idea and it’s dead simple to use. I had a number of connection problems as I tried to use it, but when it was working it was pretty sweet!
- contestant
Those most likely weren’t connection issues, just a rendering bug. If you refresh the sounds appear where you put them most if not all the time. Thanks for your feedback. Much appreciated.
jesusabdullah
contestantThis is pretty friggin' sweet. I wish there were slightly prettier sounds though. I can’t compose a tune to save my life and when you only have techno sounds it’s really easy to hurt yourself! The overall design of things is pretty sweet but I wish you guys could’ve gotten to the icons a little bit. :(
It’d be cool if something came of this one, like if you guys worked on it afterwards and made it more polished.
- contestant
The sounds were somewhat of an afterthought, considering we didn’t have a lot of time to source them and no one was available to make any.
We had planned on having icons for sounds, but decided colors were sufficient for the scope of the project and our deadline. I was hoping that we could have had made them better looking.
We plan on continuing to work on and improve it.
MEgrez
contestantlooks cool!
stagas
contestantGo Loopon!
ncb000gt
contestant
geradjudgeIt looks great, and seems like it could be a ton of fun. I had trouble getting the sound to loop in Safari, but worked correctly in Chrome. Ran into a number of bugs with dragging and dropping and getting things to play. My biggest feedback is that it’s really hard to understand what’s going on socially. Having some better indication of what other people are doing on the page (maybe by showing their mouse cursors) would be useful. All in all it has potential though, I’m interested to see where you take this post NKO.
Techwraith
contestantLove the concept! The interface looked like a couple other NKO entries (don’t remember which off the top of my head), but it looks great. The icons need some polish. Sometimes I couldn’t get the sound to work, but other than that, great job!
Coreh
contestantPretty slick interface. Very tablet-like. I was surprised by the concept, so 5 stars in inovation. I did encounter some hiccups, so I’m giving 3 stars in completeness.
ammmir
contestantawesome! i loved playing with it, but there many bugs when adding or removing sounds from the pattern. also you should combine the chat and library tab. the x to remove is also too small. the interface is beautiful! chat doesn’t work. and there are some strange timing delays.
i look forward to playing with it again!
aashay
contestantPretty sweet idea and pretty fun too. I don’t like how it doesn’t put me in the room right away after creation. I also couldn’t figure out how to create a private room (so that strangers stop messing up my sweet beatz).
The UI is a bit buggy for me (using Chrome on Linux). Sometimes the loops don’t go away when I click the close button on them. Seems like there are a lot of places where I need to refresh the page too.
Also I kind of hate the cymbal sounds. That’s just me though.
mustardamus
contestantazlen
contestantjuliogreff
contestantjimfleming
contestantpkrumins
contestantBeep bum bum bum. Beep bum bum bum. Beep bum bum bum. Fun.
mahemoffjudgeGreat app, great fun. Had some issues with it not showing anything, or not updating the loop display, but seeds of awesome here!
rmurpheyjudgeMake this prettier and it will be amazing. My favorite so far.
Very good idea!