Waves Audio is now shipping Waves Stream, a remote audio collaboration service that allows music and audio creators to share audio directly from their DAW with their co-creators or clients, in real time.
Whether you want to share your latest production ideas with a co-writer, share a mix for instant real-time feedback, or receive audio for collaboration, you can now easily share your DAW audio with producers, musicians and mixers working remotely, as if you were in the same room.
Waves Stream offers low latency, secure link sharing, and unique features such as integrated mic control – all within a streamlined UI that makes remote audio sharing as easy as clicking the big “stream” button.
The Waves Stream Send plugin includes a Mic talkback function which allows you to provide real-time commentary on a song or mix you’re sharing while playing it – similar to a studio’s talkback function. By sidechaining any channel that has a mic connected to Waves Stream, you can share your thoughts with easy gain control.
Waves Stream is private and Secure, ensuring that your audio will reach ONLY whomever you intended. First, every stream is a one-time, single-use link guaranteeing privacy and confidentiality. Second, if someone doesn’t click on a link within five minutes of you sending it, the stream will terminate. For added protection, you have the option to easily password-protect your links.
With Waves Stream, you can start sharing pro-quality audio from your DAW audio within seconds, without disrupting your creative flow. Simply load the Waves Stream plugin onto your master bus or on a designated track, press the big play button, and share the link.
Listening via the Waves Stream web player requires no license. The Waves Stream web player is readily available to anyone with a Waves Stream link. Furthermore, you can choose to listen either via a web player or a DAW. If you prefer to listen to incoming audio through your DAW, you simply use the “Receiver” plugin included in your Waves Stream license.
You an also use Waves Stream to check your own mixes outside of your usual environment. Just pull out your phone, scan the Waves Stream QR code, loop your audio – and listen through your AirPods, car speakers, or anywhere else.
Features:
- Collaborate remotely by sharing your DAW audio in real time
- User-friendly UI for easy one-click audio sharing
- Listen anywhere via web player (desktop, laptop, tablet, phone)
- Also listen in your DAW: ‘Receiver’ plugin included in your license
- Mic talkback function: Communicate directly via Waves Stream
- Check your own mixes away from your studio via easy QR code
- Lossless audio powered by proprietary Waves Falcon codec
- Secure & private: One-time links, optional password protection
- Low latency via peer-to-peer connection
- As an internet-based service that relies on a dynamic web infrastructure for real-time remote communication, Waves Stream is offered on a SaaS (software-as-a-subscription) model.
Pricing and Availability:
Waves Stream is available to users either as a standalone monthly or annual subscription (separate from any other Waves subscription), or as part of the larger Waves Creative Access subscription.
Interesting that you can *only* access this via subscription option with no one-time purchase option available AFAIK. I guess because of the streaming nature of the tool, there’s an on-going cost to maintain the infrastructure.
I’ve been looking for good collaboration software, and this “feels” like it’d be useful, but I’m wondering what’s the actual use case? Is there a benefit to live streaming what I’m playing on a DAW to someone versus just sending them an audio file? I guess it saves the hassle of bouncing and sending audio, if someone wants to listen to something one-time?
What would be really nice is a program where you can just store a DAW file in the cloud and them someone else can access it. I’m really surprised that doesn’t exist within DAWs already.
They tell you the use case – secure, real-time collaboration & client previews.
That tells you right there that this is for people doing professional work, where you don’t want randos getting access to your DAW files or work in progress.
It’s my understanding that this you need latencies sub 25ms to play music together in real time. It’s also my understanding that this is impossible because of the physical limitations of our internet technology. Notice that there is no actual data for expected latencies, just the assurance that they will be ‘low’. Sure guys. I’ll believe you when you back it up.
I don’t think this is for performing together remotely, I think it is for collaborating on mixing/mastering in “real-time”, probably in a similar way that you might collaborate with someone on a Word doc.
agreed.
25ms is massive and totally unworkable
The human ear/brain is sensitive enough to pick up on sync mismatch of about 5ms
I had a few Roland boutique devices at one point. I measured the audio over USB having a latency of about 15ms
Even this was completely unusable when being played alongside music coming from the DAW
The phase alignment of kicks, snares and other percussive sounds has to be less than 10ms for usable and less than 5ms to be tight
agreed.
however, “Collaborate remotely by sharing your DAW audio in real time” – if you’re just going DAW to DAW, latency can be accommodated at each endpoint. i don’t see where in the text ‘playing’ is the point of this product.
and whatever this means: “Also listen in your DAW: ‘Receiver’ plugin included in your license”
as FSOL showed; you need ISDN @ 10ms to ‘play’. Frame Relay was pretty tight too.
FSOL lads had it nailed down
Saw the ISDN show at Bloc weekend in 2009
Superb
Elk Audio has recently released a VST/AU version of their Elk LIVE software which does both remote recording (for the common producer use-case) and low-latency bi-directional streaming (for musicians to play together). It is still free (for now).
Of course, low enough latency for online jamming will probably benefit from a good connection and an ethernet cable but I’ve had very good results on Wifi between London and Stockholm as well.