Elixir Sound Library

Welcome one and all to the next iteration of our awesome DevNTell series. For those of you who don't know what DevNTell is, it's aimed to be a platform for all DAO members to be able to present the cool stuff they've been building and share their passions. The aim is to have these 30-minute sessions where people can present their ideas and take questions.

I am awesome to welcome the next DevNTell presenter, Jake Warren, who will be presenting Elixir Sound Library. Take it away, Jake.

Thank you, Narb. I'll give a quick introduction about myself. I've been doing web development for about three years and web3 development for probably six months now. I joined the Developer DAO in October and it's been a great experience meeting everyone and seeing what they're building.

Today I wanted to show you this project I've been working on called Elixir Sound Library. I'm going to try and share my screen. I spent all morning trying to get the screen share working on Discord, but here we go.

Basically what it is, is a music sampling platform. If I come up with a guitar riff, a bass riff, or a drum beat and I want to let other people sample it and use it in their artwork, I can upload it to this as an NFT. Other users can then license it and have full rights to use it in their songs.

The key here is that it's minted as an NFT, but when someone licenses it, there's no transfer of ownership. The creator retains ownership, but the licensee's address is tracked along with the NFT to prove they paid for it and have the rights to it.

I'll walk you around the UI. This is on Rinkeby, but I plan on launching on Arbitrum soon. If you go to browse, it displays the sounds. I don't know if you guys can hear the audio through this, but here is Jwar's slappy bass.

The popular section sorts sounds by the number of samples. You can click on the artist to see the artist page. If you want to sample a song, you go to the sample page which gives you the full display. I've been getting rate-limited, so I don't know if everything will work.

Once you connect your wallet, you can view the licenses you have acquired and the sounds you have uploaded. I'll try to sample one now. It looks like it might just work. There we go, samples increased to two.

Now I have the rights to use this sample. I can chop it up, sample it, and do whatever I want with it. There is also a creation page for uploading sounds, setting the price, and choosing a file.

Elixir Sound Library takes a 2% licensing fee. That is how the platform would make money. You can mint a sound for free, but each time it is licensed, 2% of the price goes to the platform. While we wait for it to mint, I'll take questions.

What was your inspiration for creating something like this?

I've been a musician for most of my life and have played in bands and programmed music in Logic and Ableton. I noticed many audio NFT projects were for full songs, but I felt this was a more useful way to use the technology for independent creators who want to share their work and make money.

Everything is stored on IPFS. I store the audio file and then reference it in the metadata along with the file type. Many producers prefer a certain audio type whether it be a wave file or an MP3, so it's really just preference.

Are there any file type restrictions, or can more or less any audio format be uploaded?

Right now, it's set to accept any audio input. I was wondering what I should do about that, but for right now, I'll just keep it to any audio format.

Awesome project, by the way. Curious to know, what was the toughest or most annoying part of any aspect of this project for you?

Probably really just dealing with IPFS. I had a hard time settling on the metadata schema and the storage pointers. Also, the general web3 connection to the blockchain and the connect button is always a challenge as there are so many ways to do it.

Why IPFS versus Arweave?

I chose IPFS because I had more experience with it. I understood that with Arweave, you have to pay upfront in AR tokens every time you want to store something, which complicates things for users compared to IPFS.

Arweave has a set formula to determine cost based on file size for permanent storage. For audio files, that cost could grow quite a bit compared to the small files I use. IPFS is popular and many people use it, so it makes sense why you chose it.

I love this project. For songs, users often have multiple versions as they remaster or edit. Do you think users will want to update their samples, and how should you handle that?

That's a good question. I looked at marketplaces like Zora where owners can update the metadata. Right now, it's set as a one-time upload for simplicity, but the creator could always re-upload something new.

Are there ways for community members to help out with the library, or is it private for now?

All the code is public on my GitHub. I've been looking for a developer who knows how to use The Graph, because I have no experience with that and I've been querying the blockchain directly, which is likely why I'm getting rate-limited.

I'm also thinking of marketing ideas like sampling competitions where people use sounds from Elixir in their songs and a panel votes on the best one. I think that would encourage people to use the platform and build the library.

Can you hit me with some of that slappy bass again? Yeah, that's real nice and smooth.

What's the plan for enforcing licensing here? How do you expect that to happen?

I don't really know much about enforcing licensing yet, but we track the addresses that have licensed a sound to prove rights. I'll probably just write up a terms and conditions type of thing. If anyone has suggestions on that, it would be helpful.

This reminds me of the Tunes project. There could be an interesting partnership there since they have a large audience of artists and use AI-generated album art, which would work well with this.

Could you go over the tech stack you used for this project?

It is built with Next.js and Hardhat for smart contracts and testing. The styling is done with Chakra UI. This was my first project using Chakra and I really like it.

Thank you, Jake, for presenting and viewing this. I hope to launch it in a few weeks. We have an open slot for next week, and then we'll be skipping the holiday breaks. I'll post the sign-up link in the Notion wiki. Happy weekend, everyone.