Music Maker JAM Seeks Social Platform for Amateur Musicians

The neat thing about Music Maker JAM (MMJ) is its ability to let users pick and choose from thousands of clips of previously recorded individual musical instruments played in various genres, and then compile them into a completely new musical production with anywhere from one to eight tracks of music play time. Authoring with it is like playing with Legos: there are nearly infinite combination possibilities and the results are bound to please someone's ears. The result from MMJ's quality mobile versions on popular platforms like Android can be exported into other musical composition software available from MAGIX (a German-based manufacturer) for the PC (Windows 7, Windows 8/10). From what I understand you can also export your content as MP3 files--at least when using the PC versions. An Apple version also exists in the iTunes store. So obviously this is a multi-platform software application that caters to amateur composers who don't want to deal with sheet music or the more complicated musical theory or experience required when producing a melody from scratch. It gives you building blocks of common prefabricated rhythms, beats, and melodies that you can then tailor. There are also hundreds of well-thought-out and arranged settings and preferences in the app that help an amateur decide how to arrange a score and effortlessly customize things like tempo, pitch, and the right keys desired for each measure. You can copy and paste parts of your arrangement and build up the score progressively over time at your leisure, play it back repeatedly, and record the final draft to post it on MMJ's social Community site--also accessible from the app. To top it off, you can also record your own custom vocals on top of the music you create. So, although detractors (usually real musicians, unlike me) may criticize the app for how it cheats the process of original musical composition--allowing true amateurs to build masterpieces that are really based on other people's recorded instruments--the app does, in fact, offer the potential for original work. No wonder MMJ's online social Community feature is teeming with hordes of brand new users making contributions daily.

Composing a musical piece in Music Maker JAM for Android. 

And that latter feature--the social outlet--is the focus of my review. It's what makes MMJ an attractive app for many users, yet at the same time somewhat sinks its value because of its grossly under-developed social and search features. People--especially in today's socially recluse Internet and electronic commerce society--long for online interaction, if not even their own fifteen minutes of fame. MMJ, with its quick, non-technical means to put together a melody, offers the general public just that: an opportunity to shine on a potentially global performance stage. There are visibly hundreds if not thousands of European, American, and Far Eastern active users from Russia and other countries constantly on the system--and you can see them daily plopping hundreds upon hundreds of imaginative new musical arrangements there. People can play their peers' scores right from this stream-capable Community page on the app, and they can click Like and comment on each. Users can even set themselves up to follow their favorite amateur artists as they contribute new content. However, your contributions can get easily lost in the shuffle! Each time you visit the Community's "Explore" news feed, the sheer number of new contributions by the hour push down your latest new jam out of mind and out of sight. Thankfully, MMJ allows users to include customized album covers as they present their jams on the in-app Community's "Explore" news feed. Employing a clever image can make listening to a user's contributions seem more enticing as folks browse the feed. You can even search using keywords and try to find, for example, all the pieces that have the words "slam funk" in their names. I myself frankly have had a lot of trouble getting that search feature to perform accurately as searches for particular word sequences appear not to be searched for in the most expected, intuitive manner; instead they result in haphazard matches on the search result list, which will include items that may have only the title "funk", or simply items where a user's name begins with the word "slam"--neither of which truly satisfies my intended search criteria.

 

The MMJ Community is a first attempt at establishing some social interaction and exposure to Magic Maker Jam (MMJ) artists. I'm especially happy with its ability to report inappropriate or abusive content on the "Explore" musical news feed. That was definitely an important inclusion in this system considering many MMJ artists are youth and they're fairly anonymously intermingled with adults.  But as far as building a healthy, thriving online community of musical artists, that's where the quality of the social interaction stops. Abuse of the system is common, with many inappropriate images pop up on some users' album covers. There is also a significant number of deceptive users trying to usurp the identities of others or ride on their coattails by branding their songs after another contributor's successful musical posts. Even MMJ's official page on the Community is hard to identify due to the mounds of other similarly named unofficial profiles. Entirely missing also are several key elements necessary for a thriving online community of multi-genre content providers. Although there are means to discover new music, there is no precise method to search by genre classification, rate songs with any meaningful musical rating system, nor is there an established quality curation process for the rapidly growing mass of unjudged user contributions. All in all, the Community feature of MMJ is just not yet at the maturity level it needs to be for a more satisfying social experience. Coupled along with MAGIX's hodge-podge of odd, disjoint, and somewhat mismanaged web-based social networks, you unfortunately get an amateurish impression of the company. I mean, there's an MMJ page on all these social networks, but none seem to directly correlate to nor enhance the in-app Community page. They just seem to all stand apart from each other with completely incongruent user authentication systems and unrelated content threads, adding to the frustration of an already inefficient and fragmented social machine for MMJ artists:

• Facebook - http://facebook.com/musicmakerjam
• Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/musicmakerjam
• Twitter - http://twitter.com/musicmakerjam
• SoundCloud - https://soundcloud.com/musicmakerjam
• Tumblr - http://musicmakerjam.tumblr.com
• band.us - https://band.us/band/64790111
• YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChSb8fjGwuzkHwcB_1AaNpg

Furthermore, to add to the plethora of confusing domain names, MMJ itself appears to be hosted on a site named justaddmusic.net, while the parent manufacturing company is at magix.com. When registering the PC app, a confirmation e-mail sends you over to a URL prefixed with https://api.jam-community.com/user/confirm, yet the resulting webpage coughs up:

{"error":"The user does not exist.","error_description":"The user does not exist."}

Obviously, the background software application handling the user registrations is either under construction or simply buggy--but it's just not a good first impression especially knowing that the app already has several years out in public release. The disparate social media presence just doesn't seem to match up with the high quality of the German manufacturing behind the main Magic Maker JAM application. This main content authoring app, in terms of what it was designed to do, is both pleasing and fun, easy to use, well put together, and robust. Unfortunately, if the company continues to fumble in its uncoordinated attempts to transition its loyal user base into this highly confusing, fragmented and ineffective mix of social outlets, many may grow disillusioned and move on to other competing social music platforms.

MMJ's in-app Community page features an "Explore" tab where you can discover new music posted to the app by international users chronologically in somewhat of a newsfeed format--just that this is not the most efficient method to find the genre of music you'd like to hear, and unfortunately, the Search feature (accessible via the magnifying glass at top right) doesn't help much in narrowing that down either.

There is some light at the end of the tunnel for MAGIX's Music Maker JAM's social platform, however: currently, a chance to publish your music to the world over more popular and well-established music streaming platforms like Spotify and iTunes is being promoted at a 10% discount (oh yeah, this is going to cost you, but you get to keep 100% of the royalty fees every time someone plays your tune on those platforms). This may be interesting to individuals who'd really like to get a chance to start a musical career. The MMJ folks are partnering with another firm called iMusician to carry out this vision. Also, a new app called Loudly is expected to be released by the company in 2018 to [hopefully] bring together all the disparate social networks it currently manages. Touted by MAGIX as "the perfect streaming community for Music Maker JAM" per the announcement on the Android app, it's still kind of hard to see how it will "bring together new music talent" as the CEO claims--especially as it now adds yet another  domain name to the already too diverse MMJ musical software application and website universe. It remains to be seen to what extent Loudly will actually address the limitations and weaknesses in MMJ's current content sharing venues--or whether it will actually finally provide aspiring MMJ amateur artists a mature, more intuitive, and functional social outlet.

Microsoft Drops Access Web App Support, Breathes New Life Into SharePoint with PowerApps

SharePoint's real power lies in its multi-faceted means to mash and categorize and share and add collaborative value over a web interface to all of a company's content that's stored as Microsoft Office document types (e.g., Excel, Word, PowerPoint, Outlook, Access). Up until recently (as it was last supported in June 2017), Microsoft Access 2016 web apps running on the SharePoint platform--dubbed Access Services for SharePoint Online--was the pinnacle (in my opinion) of Microsoft's own off-the-shelf solutions with which consultants and power users could help their clients or employers tap into all of SharePoint's collaborative power. It had some muscle, sporting a SQL Server back end with Microsoft Access' amazing front-end development technology--all served over the web! This was definitely a step up from the old Access Web Database feature included in Access 2010 which really relied on the underpowered Access engine under the hood. I mean, just talking about the new Access Services for SharePoint Online makes me feel like a sports car aficionado raving over new engine specs! Only that, kind of like the vehicle buy-back program Volkswagen recently instituted over its diesel emissions recall, this muscle car has been indefinitely recalled! I never even got to see a model on the lot! Microsoft has received a lot of negative flack over its decision to abruptly end the life span of Access Services for SharePoint Online (aka Access web apps), an integral part of many businesses' newly automated web database services. I too was quite disappointed myself, having been a Microsoft Access fan for decades now. I couldn't wait to get my chance to develop client solutions on Office 365 with this new Access version! Can't now! Bummer.

The Case for PowerApps

To be fair, Chris McNulty at Microsoft has announced the company will continue support of Microsoft Access web apps for on-premises installations of SharePoint, just not for SharePoint Online (Office 365). He also said traditional Microsoft Access desktop app support (which is all the Access I ever knew) won't be affected by this decision. After reading his post, I have to give Microsoft credit also for making the tough decision to drop Microsoft Access web apps in favor of a new replacement web technology for SharePoint called PowerApps. It makes sense now.

To be frank, SharePoint websites had begun to feel like dated technology. Sure, they recently introduced the new Modern experience. But even that's not enough for power users and applications developers like myself. Unfortunately, whereas Microsoft Access would have filled that gap bringing exciting, powerful new automation features, even out of the factory Access web apps really couldn't compete with the rapidly advancing mobile technology that's out there. Access was originally designed for the PC platform; however, PowerApps was, "designed with a mobile-first strategy" (per Ben Clothier and Andy Tabisz in Introduction to PowerApps for Access Web Apps Developers). Additionally, Access was built to handle relational data from a relational database management system (RDBMS); users today would be glad to know that PowerApps can harness the data from almost any type of data source, not just an RDBMS. This enables it to perform what are called "mashups", where disjoint data from various sources can be cross-referenced and repackaged for previously impossible or unimagined user experiences. PowerApps is the technology boost SharePoint developers really needed! Now in Chris McNulty's words,

Over the last several years it has become clear that the needs of our customers have grown beyond the scope of what Access Services can offer, such as mobile device support, integration with line of business data, and professional developer extensions.

When we researched how to close these gaps, the answer became clear as well; we’re aligning efforts behind Microsoft PowerApps as the way to build no-code business solutions on desktop and mobile devices.  PowerApps offers a comprehensive set of application building tools, connection to custom web APIs, and a wide array of database options including SharePoint lists, SQL Azure databases, Common Data Service and third-party data sources. 

This is good news for the Microsoft camp, especially considering the dwindling interest in SharePoint on Google searches as you can see from the search trend graphs below. Here, we see that interest in the earliest versions of SharePoint has been understandably winding down:



Even interest in the most popular versions ever of SharePoint is also dwindling (version years 2007, 2010, and 2013). Surely, the widening technology gap between Microsoft SharePoint technology and the rapidly growing web plays a factor here:



However, since Microsoft began transforming the declining SharePoint brand, introduced the Modern experience, relabeled it as the fully web-aligned Office 365 and added PowerApps, things are looking up!



With its new PowerApps offering, Office 365 becomes an automation powerhouse. And it is clear Office 365 is the hands-down leader in collaborative office technology! Just look at how the interest logged by Google searches shows it's leading the competitors such as IBM Lotus, Google Apps, and Box for Business. Wow!



Now Microsoft PowerApps' major benefit is its ability to combine and mashup data from a large array of different sources, a major step ahead of Microsoft Access' main reliance on a relational database source. Let's take a glimpse at how other similar mashup tools are faring on the Internet in terms of interest. Mind you, most of these tools only lend themselves for use by expensive consultants, not to mention the overhead of the tool's manufacturer price! In contrast, PowerApps as of this writing is FREE to all SharePoint users on an Office 365 subscription, and it's minimally priced for other customers:



I can honestly say now that the PowerApps gamble Microsoft took was a winner after using the product myself and coding a few apps. Consider how as a SharePoint web development tool and as a "cross-platform service, you are able to run the apps you create across all of your devices including Windows, iOS, Android, and the web browser" when you develop using PowerApps (per James Oleinik, Microsoft).

PowerApps In Action

I've seen PowerApps in action now. I've developed some functional apps with it both for myself and for my employer and I can say it's got the goods. Development for it feels a lot like traditional Microsoft Access app development. You start with the data you need, identifying whatever new connections you need from a myriad of possible data source types PowerApps makes available to you.

A long list of connection types is available to applications built in PowerApps.

I mean, the list of possible new connection types seems endless!

Now on the development user interface, there are new names for things--like a form is actually called a screen (because traditional Access forms were meant to run on Windows but PowerApps screens are expressly made to correspond to an actual phone or tablet form factor!). Fields such as textboxes and comboboxes are lumped with their associated labels into what are called "cards", and they automatically readjust themselves on the screen as you throw new "cards" in to represent other data.The coding for events and data validation is entirely new with lots of new function names I had not seen before in Microsoft Access nor Excel for that matter. But there's a distinct feel that sets PowerApps apart from the traditional Access development interface, particularly because of the cross-platform compatibility that's been ingrained into it (of course, there's JavaScript in there, but are the underpinnings that enable PowerApps to be cross-platform actually Xamarin-based? I have yet to find out!)

Of course, PowerApps development is all done over the web--which is distinctly different from Microsoft Access desktop app development or even the old Access Web Database creation experience. But PowerApps is better. Not only can you interface with what are clearly database sources such as SQL Server or SharePoint lists, but your data can also reside in non-traditional repositories like OneDrive or Google Drive. You can connect and mashup data from virtually anywhere it seems. The list of configurable data sources is overwhelmingly inclusive, far more than I've ever seen on any Microsoft product. It almost makes it feel like this product is not originally from good old proprietary Microsoft! The interface has this swanky third-partyish feel to it. To me it's reminiscent of JackBe and their proprietary mashup tools...only now Access has made such functionality infinitely more accessible to end users.

Now, being a cutting edge Rapid Application Development tool, there's still a level of tinkering I still have to do to get some things to work right in the PowerApps applications I build. This is not for the faint-hearted! The platform appears to be always under construction while still operational, too. Sometimes it feels like you can hear the Microsoft developers hammering away behind the interface as you are working with it because things are changing faster than the training videos and websites can keep up with. But I'm sold on PowerApps. The SharePoint development platform has definitely gotten the second wind it so badly needed in today's rapidly advancing technology climate!