Rifflet is a new site where musicians can gather to finish each other’s work. The concept involves the uploading of something called a “rifflet,” which is a piece of a song – like a bass line, a guitar riff, a drum beat, or something else altogether. Each rifflet must also be less than 60 seconds long. Members of the site can then browse through these “proto-songs,” and combine them with other rifflets they find or even just incorporate them into their own original music.
The Rifflet Homepage
The legalities of the material on the site are covered by the various CC licensing options that Rifflet has built into their UI. Although, as the Creative Commons blog points out, the license choices are only visible after you click a track’s title. That could make it hard for someone looking for works of only one type of license, for example. Not only that, but the license is all the way down at the bottom of the page, too. However, that is a problem that could easily be corrected by adding a “license” option to their current “browse for audio” page, where you can already search by artist, genre, and title.
The rifflets themselves can be played, tagged, rated, commented on, and downloaded and each rifflet’s page will show the artist, title, genre, length, description, and the format of the recording.
On your user profile page, you can enter the usual information, like username, web site, favorite artists, and your location, but you can also enter in your band’s name and create a “stage name” for yourself, like “Hammer Smashface”:
Rifflet User Profile
There is also a handy “recording guide” on Rifflet, which will help those new to using web tools with recording music and uploading their tunes.
The site still has a few kinks to work out – for example, although logged in, I still got the notification that I needed to register or log in in order to rate a track.
Rifflet isn’t exactly the first of its kind in this genre – a site called Kompoz offers similar functionality. At Kompoz, musicians can also record tracks and invite others to collaborate on their songs. However, the difference between the two is that Kompoz’s aim is really more focused on collaborative songwriting, where Rifflet users can simply browse and download, with no real need to interact that much with other community members. DJs, for example, could cull through the music clips on Rifflet for song pieces to use in their next remix. Besides user profiles, there aren’t really any social networking features – you don’t invite others to join, create a friends lists, upload profile photos, or maintain a list of favorite artists. Instead, Rifflet simply functions as an open place where music can be shared online.
