Splice, which is currently in beta, is a very cool music remixing community. Combining a social network with a neat mixing tool and a sweet design, it's one of the most original new sites of the past few weeks. The company has offices in Chicago and Barcelona, and the product has been in development for around 9 months.
Splice allows users to upload sounds and mix them into songs. Multiple formats are supported - WAV/AIFF, MP3, OGG and FLAC - and uploaded sounds are covered by the Creative Commons Attribution license. In other words: users can remix your sounds, but you'll be credited as the source. If you don't have any sounds to upload, you can record a sound or find some new ones using free sound libraries like CCMixter and Freesound. Alternatively, you can just grab sounds from other people's profile pages. What's more, you can grab complete songs and remix them right away.
The mixer itself is pretty neat. If you're used to desktop remixing tools, then it'll seem pretty basic, but for a Flash-based app they've done well. Tracks are represented on a timeline, and you can adjust the volume, pan and BPM, as well as dragging the tracks around. Once you're happy with your mix, you can publish it on the site.
It's also worth noting that kSolo and SingShot, the karaoke comunities, haven't done much following their initial buzz - kSolo has actually been offline all day today, without even a holding page to explain the error. SingShot, meanwhile, is an outstanding platform - but they screwed up by trying to charge users for the service. Why mention these? Well, all these sites are trying to get users to contribute content, and it's taking a while for them to build up a decent number of quality contributions. I think most of them will succeed eventually, but it'll take time.
At the risk of getting repetitive, one way to speed up adoption is to plug into other networks. New social networks shouldn't be standalone communities - they need to hook in to every other platform to survive. There are millions of users on Friendster, MySpace, Piczo, Xanga, hi5, Blogger and Windows Live Spaces who would love something like Splice, and a widget would be just the ticket (see MySpace codes for a list of companies who are trying this).
What I'm really talking about is making the leap from being a niche community to a mainstream service - Last.fm has succeeded here, while Pandora hasn't. Splice could go either way, and I'm hoping they make the jump.
SpliceMusic User?
Mashable's Splice profile is HERE - feel free to add Mashable to your friends list if you sign up, or you're already a member.
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SpliceMusic.com
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A Splice Profile
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Splice Mixer
(thanks, Noah!)