Allihoopa – the world’s musical hub

Most of you know Allihoopa very well, still lets start with a brief history lesson. Allihoopa (formerly called Discover) was a project of Propellerhead, makers of Reason. The project has grown quite rapidly and left the PH nursery to become a separate company, Allihoopa, at the beginning of 2016. Since then, the whole ecosystem and user have been growing dynamically thanks to the continuous development. One can now Drop and Pick up tunes on Allihoopa with a series of great Apps such as all versions of Korg Gadget, Moog Mode15, Soundtrap, Allihoopa`s own Figure and Take and their bigger brother Reason which now supports VSTs. For a while now while now users have been able to create groups (public or secret) to share and discuss music. Recently, Allihoopa became available as an iOS App providing a smoother user experience on mobile devices.

Now you know everything you need plus a bit more about Allihoopa, lets get started and try to find out what the future holds from Leo.

RT(tiker01):  Hi Leo! I hope all is good and you enjoy the Swedish summer! Could you please introduce yourself to our readers?

Leo: Hi! I’m Leo, product manager at Allihoopa, which means I work with our team of developers and designers to understand how we can best help music-makers around the world have fun on Allihoopa, test, tweak, build and release it. I’ve been making music, producing and playing in bands since I was a little kid and you can find some of my doings at allihoopa.com/Leo. Hit me up and we’ll make something together!

RT(tiker01):  Let’s tap into the middle! Could you tell us when was the Allihoopa vision born and whose idea was it?

Leo: There’s no lone genius behind it all—it’s been a collaborative effort over many years. Realizing that the democratization of music-making that has happened over the past thirty years really has been focused at turning everybody into producers, but leaving a lot of people out through that. We missed the inherently social aspect of music, getting together and playing with others, continuing on what others have made, or just gather around liking the same idea. Allihoopa truly is for everyone who wants to be involved in ‘doing’ music—whether that means singing, rapping, clapping, commenting, or producing.

RT(tiker01): How many people work at Allihoopa currently? Are you looking for people?

Leo: There’s 17 of us in the office right now. About half are developers, the rest of us do product management (me), design, testing, marketing, project management and more. We’re looking for developers, so if you’re a coder who’s excited about the future of music, you should definitely join us! (RT: https://allihoopa.com/jobs)

RT(joeyluck):  Leo, previously we discussed the possibility of credit attribution for Allihoopa. Something like a Creative Commons Attribution license would be great! https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. I feel it fits well with Allihoopa by allowing artists to share and build-upon without barriers, under the simple terms of attributing credit (when publishing outside of Allihoopa). Was a conclusion met or is this something you are still looking into perhaps?
RT(jappe ): Do you plan to support copyrighted content in the future?
RT(tiker01): Just to add one more question related to this topic, is there a chance we will be able to share pieces in a (password/PIN) protected way?

Leo: Allihoopa is an open platform for sharing music ideas, snippets, recordings, songs… We call it “music in the making”, because we think music on Allihoopa is never ‘done’ in the traditional sense of the word. A piece can always be remixed, reworked, built on, sampled, or even covered by yourself or someone else. It’s always in progress, waiting to be turned into something else.
We want it to be open to everyone to participate in the music, at the level they’re comfortable with. Which can be anything from recording backing vocals to a piece someone else has started or providing feedback, to starting something new to inspire others.
Our terms are very much inspired by creative commons, with some additions so that our users are able to do what we want our platform to be. All content on Allihoopa is copyrighted. If you make something, it’s yours. If you drop it to Allihoopa, you allow us to publish it on our site, and give other members a license to use it in their music. (More info on the matter can be found in the Terms of Services here: https://allihoopa.com/tos.

RT(jappe): Is there a chance we will see an Allihoopa app on Android soon? We are asking this as we saw that you were looking for developers with Android background. Moreover, AKAI released their iMPC for Samsung mobiles so it seems like Android is catching up lately. (previously latency was a problem, but Android Marshmallow improved that: http://www.androidauthority.com/android-6-0-marshmallow-audio-latency-670727/)

Leo: You can already use Soundtrap, one of the Allihoopa-connected apps, on Android since it runs in the web browser! Will there be more Android apps on Allihoopa in the future? Absolutely. We have an Android SDK for third party apps available today to developers.

RT(joeyluck): From the About description of Allihoopa: “Allihoopa provides access to its platform through open APIs and software toolkits, enabling integration of any app or service.” What is the process for a developer/app to integrate Allihoopa? I understand it says ‘open APIs,’ but I assume there might be other steps involved for developers to get their hands on the software and for you to integrate and feature the app on the Allihoopa site? Is there an application/acceptance stage? What are the requirements if any?
RT(tiker01): Just to add Joey’s question do you have an API for desktop besides mobile?

Leo: Allihoopa is available for both mobile, desktop and web apps. Soundtrap runs in the web browser, Korg Gadget runs on Desktop, and Figure, Take, Moog Model 15 and Gadget run on iOS. Anyone can use our open SDKs to add Allihoopa to their apps by just grabbing them on GitHub. They’re open source, too. When you’re ready to release, pretty much all you need to do is contact us to get a secret key and provide us with some attribution assets and you are all set.

RT(joeyluck): Do you or your colleagues use the Apps made by the other members of the ever growing Allihoopa family?

Leo: Absolutely—all the time!

RT(tiker01): Gadget 3 for iOS and MAC OS both have Allihoopa integration. Right now this means that Gadget pieces can be dropped to Allihoopa. Could you tell us whether we will be able to import pieces in the future like in case of Figure or at least as into Moog Model 15?

Leo: We’re working to expand what our SDKs can do to include sharing of song files, like you see with Figure today. That just became available in the iOS and Mac SDKs, and coming soon for Android and web. I’ll leave it to Korg to say whether they’re going to make use of it in their apps. (RT: Read more about this on the Allihoopa blog!)

 

RT(tiker01): A long requested feature of Figure are stems and MIDI export (I would love to have MIDI as a live output as well) any of these are planned to be implemented?

Leo: Right now we don’t have any plans for MIDI or stems export from Figure.

RT(tiker01): Finally, how do you see Allihoopa in 5-10 years?

Leo: Ten years is a long time. I hope we’ll be faster than that to realize our vision! In the future, Allihoopa will bring all of us together for a free and open exchange of music pieces, ideas, inspiration. We want to unite everyone in “doing music” just for the sake of it. Practically, that means lots and lots of different people, from all over the world, meeting, sharing, talking, learning and collaborating through lots of different tools and platforms.

RT: Thank you Leo for your time! It was nice to have a peak into Allihoopa.

Go check out the ReasonTalk group Allihoopa and share your tunes with the community!

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