Saloote is a flawed attempt at online music collaboration
Saloote is a free app for iPhone that enables musicians to get creative with each other through the power of the Internet. Film yourself jamming out to your favorite tune, then create mashups with strangers around the world to collaborate and form an online band of sorts. Choose your contribution, let others join in and allow the app to provide the tools necessary for crafting a unified music video. Saloote requires iOS 7.0 or later.
When you launch the app you're immediately going to see a flood of very unfamiliar faces. That's because these are users of Saloote that have already created their own mashups. The way I've come to see it, there are three important aspects of the entire app that also involve the way you most likely use it: viewing mashups from other users, recording your own video or creating a mashup.
The main feed is a scrollable list of video mashups with multi-user collaboration. Tap any one to play it. The videos are somewhat clever. Every few seconds the view switches to someone else producing their own sound and gives an appropriate impression that more than one person is working to produce the entire sound you're hearing.
To avoid confusion about who does what, the recording process requires you to select a musical contribution. This is clearly labeled once its uploaded so others looking to create a mashup know what parts they can bring to the table. The options are ample: bass, dance, DJ, drum, guitar, visual, horn, keyboard, percussion, violin, vocal or other.
Saloote sounds like a fun, creative app in theory but unfortunately it doesn't come without its flaws - some of them rather significant. For starters, the app in its current state is very buggy and prone to crashing. It crashed more than once on me for seemingly no reason and when it's not crashing, chances are I'm encountering some sort of UI bug.
It doesn't get much better from there. The performance throughout the app is truly dreadful. Upon attempting to create my own mashup using a few user videos, I couldn't even get through to the creation process. A few times it would just load slowly at a consistent pace and test my patience, while other times it would load quickly but then hang at a certain percentage. Either way, I was never able to create my own mashup.
Additionally, playing videos and mashups is just as difficult. For some reason the videos never load at the speed they should. I spent more time than I should have sitting through the video buffer after only 10 or 15 seconds in. I went to other apps like YouTube to test video and even switched Wi-Fi networks as a test and the problem was isolated within the app.
It's a shame I had to spend so much of this review describing the difficulties I had with Saloote, but they honestly feel like deal breakers at this point. It has huge potential. The market isn't huge - music enthusiasts who have a desire to collaborate with strangers - but it's a great idea nonetheless with poor implementation. Hopefully the issues get patched in a future update.
Saloote is a free iPhone app in the App Store.
