Mix2r Media, Inc. is a company established in Vancouver, British Columbia by Matt MacKenzie and Duane Nickull. Tiring of the enterprise software scene, our founders decided to fill an interesting niche -- the enablement of collaboration between amateur (and maybe not-so-amateur) musicians. Duane has a musical background, having played in various bands over the years. Matt took music in high school after flunking art class, and learned a decent Fur Elise...but never really returned to music, instead focusing on enabling creativity in others by being creative with his computer.

The idea to start Mix2r occurred to Matt and Duane one evening when the pair was enjoying a bottle of '66 Nismes-Delclou Armagnac in a failed attempt to appear cultured. Nonetheless, they saved the bottle as a souvenir...

Mix2r.com is built on the Drupal Content Management platform, and leverages the absolutely fantastic work of a legion of open source developers. The site's design is essentially a verbatim copy of the Andreas09 theme, designed by Andreas Viklund. We had a few custom themes written, but they really sucked compared to Andreas' work :-) What can we say, we're programmers and musicians, not graphic artists!

Mix2r basically echoes the traditional workflow involved in creating multi-track digital audio recordings with one important difference. It uses a centralized portal to allow collaborations between musicians from any geographical location as long as they can access the site and have a basic (free) or pro (paid) membership. Mix2r has a well thought out data model which allows needs and capabilities to be matched.

Here is an example scenario of how it works:

One songwriter might have a new song designed in their head, but requires drum, guitar, bass and keyboard tracks for the song. They would record the guitar and vocal tracks to a metrenome to capture the "intent" of "feel" of the new song. The songwriter can decide what he or she will give away for those services being provided, then make a declaration on the Mix2r site. Any dummers, lead guitar, bass or keyboard players who wish to find work and contribute to others music can then search for and find the new work, download it and mix in their own tracks.

From that point on, it is up to each musician to decide if they want to respond with submissions. The first to respond might be a drummer who would require either a studio-miced drum kit, electrics drums or potentially be a wizard with a drum MIDI machine. He would download the original songwriters submission then lay down drum tracks to a click track. When done, he can upload an MP3 recording of his work mixed with the original work.

At this point, the original songwriter can decide if they want to accept it. I it is accepted, the drum submission is closed and the successful drummer is notified that his or her tracks and ideas have been accepted. The drummer can then forward the songwriter or the songwriters producer the full set of tracks for the drums. These can be remixed with a basic guitar pattern then reposted. At this point, bass players and/or any other instrument requirements could be solicited for their input to the project. One by one they would add their tracks until all the required tracks are submitted.

The final work could then be submitted as *.wav files (these are much larger than *.mp3 files) to a producer who can make the final output. When the song owner is confident the song is ready to be released, he or she can do so and it will be packaged and sent to multiple outlets such as iTunes, Magnatune (for songs that are to be sold) and/or other networks such as Kazaa or Limewire.