Who is behind this

I'm a full-stack software engineer at a big tech company by day, and an amateur music producer at night. I sing in a choir, I play in a band, and I've spent more evenings than I can count in Ableton Live and Logic. I'd rather not attach my real name to a side project while I still have a day job, so let's keep it at that.

Recording music with a group is harder than it should be

A few years ago I was the one responsible for recording songs for my choir, and I learned how painful it is to get a song finished.

To record a choir song, you have two options:

• record together in a studio, or
• record separately in everyone's home setup.

Recording together in a studio is expensive

Recording together is the traditional way, and it's fast — but it's expensive and hard to arrange. Studios that can hold tens of people are rare, they cost a lot, and the few that exist are usually far away. Getting that many people to the same place at the same time is nearly impossible, because everyone has a different schedule. For most of us, music is a hobby, not a job.

Recording separately is affordable, but the workflow is heavy

The second option is cheap, and more viable than ever: a decent home recording setup is affordable, and even a phone records vocals at usable quality.

But look at what the process actually requires. Everyone has to:

1. Record separately in their own audio software.
2. Export the takes to files.
3. Share the files — usually by dumping them into a chat group.
4. Someone collects the files and keeps track of versions.
5. Someone mixes all the tracks.
6. That person exports the mix.
7. The mix goes back into the chat group for feedback.

Nobody can hear how their take sits in the mix until the whole loop finishes, so every round of feedback takes a week or two. The people doing file management and mixing become the bottleneck. By the time the song is done, everyone is exhausted and morale is gone.

The difficulty boils down to a few things:

1. Recording and communication are asynchronous.
2. File versioning is manual and error-prone.
3. One person has to do all the mixing, because traditional DAW software assumes a single operator.
4. It takes too long to hear the mixed result and catch problems.
5. It takes too long to run another iteration.

Band recordings and remote podcast interviews hit the same wall, for the same reasons.

What about existing tools?

There are products that try to solve this. A couple of years ago my band used BandLab to record a music video for a company event. It's a web-based audio workstation; every member logs into the same project and records.

It sounded promising, but it didn't work well for us, because BandLab's collaboration is version-based. Two members can record at the same time — but that produces two versions, which someone then has to merge.

If you're a programmer, you know git. Making music in BandLab is like coding with git: neither can avoid conflicts when merging versions. Except resolving conflicts in a music project is far worse than in code, because the data is structural, not text. I'll spare you the details; merging that music video project was a nightmare.

So I started building Joint

Despite the drawbacks, BandLab fascinated me — I had no idea the web platform could support audio features that complicated. I dug into the Web Audio APIs, starting with small demos: playing music, applying effects, recording sound. At some point I realized I could build something like BandLab, but with a better collaboration model — real-time and conflict-free, the way Figma handles design files.

My favorite DAW is Ableton Live, so I modeled the editing experience on it. The goal is a shared, joint audio workstation that connects people who make music together — which is where the name Joint comes from.

I don't have much spare time. I have a small kid and a full-time job; what I have is experience with web technology, a passion for music, and the hours after everyone else goes to bed. Nights are short and early meetings are real, so it took a year and a half to reach the first milestone. The slow pace had one upside: enough time to research properly and pick solid foundations.

Where it stands

Joint is live, and I use it to record my own music projects. It already does the thing it was built for: record, mix, and finish a song together, remotely, in one shared project — no exports, no file passing, no merging.

I keep improving it based on what breaks in my own recordings. If you try it, I'd genuinely like to hear from you: what works, what's missing, whether you'd pay for it, whether you'd bring your band or choir. Write to contact@weavejam.com.

Thanks for reading!