Hello everyone.

I wanted to share a product that I’ve been working on in our company named BeatConnect, a multiplayer DAW that uses elixir and phoenix channels in the backend.

A bit of history -

The company started around the pandemic, where the founder (who is a musician), wanted to collaborate with his friends without the need to drag equipment and instruments physically, which inspired the idea.

The product originally started as a VST3 plugin that you can load into any DAW which would provided you with a small “mini sequencer” that you can invite peers to join in a collaborative session, drop samples, edit, and do what music producers do, and eventually take the edited stems back into your DAW of choice.

The original iteration used a java server which is where I originally came in, as I was a java dev before joining the company. Oddly (at the time), the website was built in elixir and live-view by a 3rd part, which I have not encountered before.

As we evolved and simplified, we made the decision to eventually deprecate the java server in favor of going all in with elixir, as it was a “natural fit” for our use case. As the Java server was a purely TCP based server with our custom protocol, the first port to the elixir backend was fairly lightweight and built off of gen_tcp, presence and pubsub.

Fast forward to today, the our server is now an umbrella application, spanning a protocol server that powers the the mDaw itself (which is now a phoenix channel server), a web-app and and admin server.

The beauty of the elixir stack is how it all clusters together so well, allow each component to message each other with ease. I’m not a huge fan of the classic ORMs (e.x. hibernate), but I’ve come to grow fond of Ecto and it’s query dsl. I’ve also really enjoyed the developer experience in the elixir ecosystem. Things tend to be well thought out, well documented and digging through the code if necessary is not too terrifying.

Happy to answer any questions

If you want to give it a shot, visit www (dot) beatconnect (dot) com

(mDaw screenshot)

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