Investment

[bazworld]

Just a quick question I have been using this software for a couple of years now,started off with guitarport and because of that have now purchased other line 6 products i.e.toneport ux2 to record vocals(yeah I know how much you guys like my vox Ha Ha ) FBV pedal and best of all a Variax 300 guitar.Now I think that I would have never purchased these items if I was not using this software.So do Line 6 invest or help Sonoma or Riffworks in any way if not why not?,because there seems to be continual problems these days with getting on line to collab or just to make a comment on a post .Does the solution to these problems lie in funding or lack of?.Perhaps it's time to seriously consider everyone's suggestion to ask us genuine Riffers to pay a subscription to use rifflink.I know that I may not be able to afford it but it may make it more usable to those who can

[tmotech]

Wow! I haven't participated in any riff-links yet, but I do intend to as soon as I get all of the last 20 years of unrecorded material done - RiffWorks being the starting point for everything I record. I have noticed a lot of complaints about Riff-Link as of late, pretty much since the release of the free demo. As I said I haven't yet participated in rifflink to comment on that, but I have noticed RiffWorld.com is SLOW! It is the slowest site that I visit. When I click on a link, sometimes all I get is a blank white page with one line of text saying "an internal server error has occured...." -- It can be frustrating just trying to leave a comment on a cool song I've heard at times, just like Baz mentioned.

I'm sure it's "growing pains" so to speak, but it really needs to be fixed soon. RWS is worth it's weight in gold to me...... errrrrrr it's software so I guess I mean, "RWS is worth it's bits in gold to me!" -- you can quote me on that - The software is amazingly intuitive with just a little crash course on the concept of RiffWorks. The first time I sat down and seriously went at recording a song, I was able to take a rather uninspired song idea I had recorded in a linear DAW (sony vegas 6), compose, arrange, mix and complete a song with vocals in one 6 hour session! This would have been impossible in a recording studio, trying to get 3 or 4 musicians together and create a new song from scratch, finished and mixed in 6 hours.

RiffWorld was an added bonus to the software for me. I never understood myspace or facebook and rarely ever checked into my profile or commented people or did any of that bull. I found the RiffWorld community and now I get the whole "web 2.0" thing now. An AWESOME community from all over the world, GREAT MUSICIANS and great, great people. What was once just an awesome recording software now became an addictive way to pass the time on the internet..... what everyone else had found in facebook and myspace and youtube, I now have with riffworld.

But, as of late, I have become frustrated with constant "internal server errors" and pages taking 5 or 10 minutes to load! Sometimes signing in to Riffworld is impossible! I totally understand why the folks at Sonoma haven't done a riffrumble - your servers, uhhh, probably can't handle it! So hold off with a riffrumble until this problem has been solved!

As a side note, I do see marked improvement when using Firefox in LINUX, over any browser in Windows, such as chrome, IE and firefox. In Ubuntu 9.04 running Firefox, I see pages loading relatively faster. It still is slow though, just not AS slow.

I'm sure that Michelle or Doug or one of those great persons at Sonoma will comment on this post soon! I am not trying to be harsh or mean or anything. I just tell it like it is and so does Baz! I really, really love RiffWorks software and I think Riffworld.com is one of the most amazing sites in the whole damn internet! Please get this web phenomenon up and running - it is quite possibly a REVOLUTIONARY tool for musicians, something that could change the face of music as we know it and certainly has changed the lives of many musicians who have used it already!

The idea of Riffworld collaborations being free is an extremely noble idea and if you can pull it off it most certainly WILL be an internet music revolution! Have you talked to Google yet? This just might be something they are looking for!

But, if you want this to be a working money generating model and expect people to pay for your services, which potentially could be well worth it, you guys gotta get in gear and figure this problem out!

The way I see it, the free route is best in the end, as it could potentially sell millions of copies of RWS for you guys. The subscription model, will be an income revenue stream for you guys only as long as your technology is the best out there. Who knows, maybe Google is already developing a totally free online recording studio with unlimited tracks and vst's and built in studio quality processing with built in guitar models and frickin' trained monkeys on drums playin' their asses off for banana's as backing rythm in some weird zoo warehouse in southern california? If that happens, you lose your monthly income and are relegated to just pushing RWS to as many musicians as you can? Or, maybe your company is the only one in the world pursuing this market, and you corner it and nobody else comes out with anything better for the next 100 years? Who knows?

My point, figure it out and quick! You have a ton of musicians, riff-junkies if you will, who are disappointed about something they had great passion for. It has become a burden to them now, and they are actually abandoning a FREE service every day! They are willing to pay Sonoma if it is stable and back to pre-T4 standards.

Have you considered letting T4 users have their own seperate domain/server? They can collaborate with a RWS user, but only post on the other "T4 server"?

Have you considered going open source? There are probably a couple of RWS users in the pool who have enough programming experience to contribute without even looking to the open-source community.

Are you using technology that is "off the shelf", or has this been created from the ground up as proprietary software/server/streaming technology? Is there a way to get the machine using the client software to take up some of the processing that is going on at the back end? I'm kind of curious about the technology Sonoma is using, as much as is safe to release of course!

I have come across a couple of other outfits offering online jamming - e-jamming is one of them. They all require a subscription fee. I haven't even bothered looking any further as up until recently I knew I could use RiffWorld for all of these needs.... now it doesn't sound like such an easy choice based on the amount of complaints I've been hearing and the extremely slow and error-prone performance of Riffworld.com's basic functions.

A concerned RWS/Riffworld user.

-Chris-

[Stymie]

I hate to say it, but about all they can tell us is that the server database is in the process of a complete overhaul. Until that's complete not much will change.

I was pretty active in Rifflink until the beginning of the year when it became so unreliable that it became non-usable to me.

Like many others I'm looking forward to it being fixed. I hope it will be done sometime this year. The database work seems to be taking forever.

Ron

[Muddhole]

Just a quick question I have been using this software for a couple of years now,started off with guitarport and because of that have now purchased other line 6 products i.e.toneport ux2 to record vocals(yeah I know how much you guys like my vox Ha Ha ) FBV pedal and best of all a Variax 300 guitar.Now I think that I would have never purchased these items if I was not using this software.So do Line 6 invest or help Sonoma or Riffworks in any way if not why not?,because there seems to be continual problems these days with getting on line to collab or just to make a comment on a post .Does the solution to these problems lie in funding or lack of?.Perhaps it's time to seriously consider everyone's suggestion to ask us genuine Riffers to pay a subscription to use rifflink.I know that I may not be able to afford it but it may make it more usable to those who can

Yeah I brought this up awhile back, (http://www.sonomawireworks.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=7678) even to go as far as to ask whether or not it was possible to get the server software code to start a Rifflink server outside of Sonoma itself. Where it'll be funded and maintained by the Rifflink member(s) that should decide on starting a subscription to that server. As time goes on, we can add to this cloud of servers as the subscribers grow as well. Maybe one day, even having servers according to genre's, virtual bands, or music clans if you will.

Didn't get a very good response when the mention of having to pay was brought up though. No one wants to come out and P(L)AY then aye?

[Stymie]

I'll gladly pay for a rock solid service. To put my money where my mouth is I bought the gold sponsorship. After paying gaming sites $10-$15 a month since 98' I understand it costs money to provide the bandwidth and infrastructure required to make it work consistantly.

They have mentioned in the past that "pay-to-play" may be in the cards, but not until it is reliable.

[bazworld]

This software and the riffworld community is the best thing I have ever come a across and the fact that rifflink is free and part of that is great but I would hate to see it loose out because of its faults. I dot really want to sound as I am complaining what I really wanted to know is do line 6 contribute in any way.

[GuitarSlinger]

Well Line 6 must be at least a business partner, they used to sell products bundled with Riffworks and now include Riffworks T4 disc in the Pod Studio boxes. At one time Riffworks only worked with a Line6 device and Line6 handled all the sales as add ons like model packs. The software was even integrated within each other.

I don't expect that SWW would want to release their business info though.

[tmotech]

I'm pretty much in the same page as GS - I would be certain that line6 is not contributing to sonoma's online service - they were however early on tightly connected via RWS line6 edition, which is soon to be or already discontinued... the contributing support given by line6 or m-audio or other companies which have products that interact with RWS for that matter is most likely minimal. Just making sure the drivers work with the software or trying to help minimize latency, etc... as far as contributing to the infrastructure of Sonoma's online service I would suspect there is nothing from any of those companies above a consulting role, if any at all.

Of course, I don't work for them or have any insider information but looking at this from a business sense, I seriously doubt it.

As far as P(L)AYING for service, I have already seen many riffworld members state they would gladly pay for a stable service, and even though I haven't participated in rifflink yet, I would be open to paying for the service! I don't think that is going to be a problem if Sonoma adopts a subscription service. If Sonoma was able to attract millions of users to it's online service (more likely if free), then outside vendors would be forced to cater to sonoma if everybody on the planet wanted hardware and software to work with RWS or some other product down the road. It's a real balancing game for the future which I hope SWW takes into consideration. I really think they have revolutionary products and ideas, we'll just have to see how far they can take it!

-chris

[hardattack]

Whoever it was that came up with the riff based recording idea, that I can acually understand and use without a 4 year collage degree should be a millionare in my opinion. riffworks software is worth 3 times the money I paid for it and I would have no problem paying for online colab.

[michelle]

Wow thanks for all the feedback guys! We can't talk publicly about investment. I can say that Line 6 and IK continue to be great partners for us in that they bundle our product in with their fab hardware, sell RWS on their websites and other co-marketing that we really appreciate. We wouldn' be here without them.

And yes we are still working hard on the server issue and really appreciate your patience and support while we sort things out with that and try to make it better than ever. Can't wait to celebrate with a RiffRumble after we are happy with a stable relaunched RiffLink/RiffWorld! It's a big job, and we have great people working on it. Until then, please keep enjoying all the great features of RiffWorks and this awesome community

Cheers,
Michelle