Mashing is heading for the mainstream. YouTube are set to rollout their Adobe-powered remixer, Photobucket released more Adobe-powered functionality in early 2007, not forgetting of course Jumpcut’s purchase by Yahoo last year and a number of start-ups, including Eyespot and MuveeMix.
Even with MySpace’s (FIM) purchase of Photobucket earlier this year, they still also invested in the more advanced functionality offered by Flektor, no doubt wanting their own in-house software to complement the existing Adobe deal with Photobucket.
Despite all the activity from the big players in the market, start-ups are still emerging and innovating. Among the new entrants are JamGlue (tutorial here) with an intuitive music mashing tool, similar to SpliceMusic mashing tool. It’s a familiar mixing interface, with layered timelines and drag and drop editing points, plus some handy right-mouse options in Flash to repeat and cut layers.
The community is slowly establishing itself with a reasonable level of user generated clips and samples up there to embed into your remix, plus evidence of rights management.
It’s fun and relatively easy to use, albeit sometimes frustratingly slow to load, and offers more advanced music-mashing functionality than the more video focused offerings above, suggesting it may have enough of a niche to survive.
Either way, mashing is heading for the mainstream.
Gautam
Thanks for the mention, Chris. My co-founders and I are having a blast running Jamglue, and watching our community grow.
You’re totally right about mashing going mainstream. We’re excited about bringing the concepts of remixing and mashing to a broad audience by giving them simple tools and a great library of audio to work from. Given that people love music, and people love to personalize stuff, we’re just trying to blend those two addictions into a new one.
You’re also right about page load times being high on Jamglue. Along with our great growth we’ve had some scaling pains, but we’re making steady progress there and soon the site should be snappy again.