Opening Up Sondbord to New Users

Next week we will begin opening Sondbord up to new users. The project was originally a private effort for the recording of the second Trovaire album, as Dennis and myself were split between Tenterfield and Paris respectively. As these things often go, the process of including collaborators led to an increase in requests to create accounts for them as well. So now it seems time to open that up a little bit more.

Trello meets SoundCloud

Sondbord started when we asked ourselves “is there a Trello meets SoundCloud for music collaboration?” What’s ironic about asking this is that we were a part of the original SoundCloud beta a long time ago. SoundCloud in those days was (if my memory is correct here) primarily around the idea of having private share links for the music projects we were working on. It was great. But like most products of that era, it struggled under the pressure from increasingly aggressive major music labels, and the genuine challenge of navigating a SaaS product through the ups and downs of the market cycles. At the moment, it’s not really the tool we need to satisfy that use case of sharing private links, or being a part of the creation cycle.

Trello is another one we’ve had some early enjoyment and appreciation for. I spent some time in Paris with Joel Spolsky, one of the creators of Trello, well before their acquisition by my fellow Aussies over at Atlassian. If you’ve not heard of Joel, outside of his various adventures as a company founder, he was (and in many circles remains) a well-known advocate for software engineering. His blog “Joel on Software” was very influential in the 2010s, so much so that we quoted it often when I worked at the open source software company Red Hat. Trello was great. But, fun nostalgic stories aside, it’s also not made for the creative process. And with respect to Atlassian, there’s nothing really gained from it being bundled into a monolith of a software giant.

Built for working bands

We needed something light, something fast, something that can host our source files and our works-in-progress alike, and… we built it.

Now you can start to gain access to it. Click the Sign Up button and drop a quick note in the beta signup form. I’ll be manually adding new users for a while.

PS: The backstory and personal insights here aren’t just for storytime. It’s to show that there’s a real human making a really useful tool for real working bands here. Both myself and Dennis (the other half of Trovaire) are software engineers and product developers as a living. We spent a good decade or so writing, producing, and touring. This isn’t some vibe coded slop made by growth hackers to flip on some secondary market. It’s the tool we use to write music with our band members spread quite literally around the world.

I’d love to have you jump in and help us build this together (or just use it and make amazing music).

— David