For those who are serious about creating music and are also fans of virtual reality (VR), AliveinVR offers the opportunity to compose music from within a VR environment. The developers have now introduced a new feature that lets user create music cooperatively.
AliveinVR acts as a MIDI controller for Ableton Live, a professional-grade music creation software. As such, it is very powerful and allows users to trigger clips, play instruments and mix from within a VR environment.
AliveinVR supports spatial mixing, so users can create an immersive binaural mix of the music, and control the track levels, trigger clips or play instruments. Visual effects are triggered from playback, making clips pulsate with light in sync to the music.
For users who want to collaborate with another musician who might live many miles away, or in another country, AliveinVR offers a potential solutions. Users can join or host an Ableton session and engage in voice chat while controlling an avatar.
Players engaged in a social music session can use a high-quality audio feed to send music to all players engaged in the session. Non-real time controls such as triggering clips and scenes or editing the step sequencer can be controlled by anyone. Real-time controls such as drumracks and instruments can be controlled only by the session host.
From the Social menu, users can invite friends from the Steam friends list, to find other people to collaborate with, or just invite someone in on a jamming session to get another opinion.
As AliveinVR is a professional-grade product, it required Ableton Live v9.2 or later to work, as it uses Ableton to generate the music. AliveinVR is available on Steam for HTC Vive, Oculus Rift an Windows Mixed Reality devices, priced at £9.99 (GBP).
Further information can be found on the Steam store, and there are some tutorials built in to AliveinVR to aid setup. VRFocus will bring you further news on AliveinVR and other VR software as it becomes available.