Auxlee: Open Source Remote Music Collaboration

I started Auxlee a long time ago with the idea of making remote music collaboration actually work. If you've ever tried to collaborate on a song with someone who isn't in the same room as you, you know the pain. You send stems back and forth, they don't line up, you have conflicted copies everywhere, someone's using Logic and someone else is on Ableton, and it's just a mess. I wanted to fix that.

The concept was simple: a plug-in that works in any DAW and handles the transfer of audio and midi files automatically. No more manual exports. No more trying to figure out which version is the latest. No more headaches trying to line up stems that were recorded on different systems. Just install the plug-in, connect with your collaborator, and start making music.

I built it out, got it working, but then life happened and it sat there. Not quite finished, not quite polished, but functional. It was one of those projects that I always meant to come back to but never quite did.

Dusting It Off

Recently I decided it was time to do something with it. I spent the past few weeks cleaning up the codebase, updating dependencies, fixing bugs that had been sitting there for years, and most importantly, preparing it to go open source. Because honestly, if this is going to be useful to anyone, it needs to be community-driven. The music production world is too fragmented, too diverse in its tools and workflows, for one person to solve this alone.

The plug-in works with nearly any DAW you can think of. It handles both audio and midi. It's designed to make asynchronous collaboration seamless—you can work on your parts whenever you want, push them up, and your collaborator gets them automatically synced in their project. No coordinating schedules, no complicated file management.

Why Open Source

Making Auxlee open source feels right for a few reasons. First, the music production community is full of incredibly talented developers and producers who could make this better than I ever could alone. Second, trust matters when you're dealing with people's creative work—open source means anyone can audit the code, understand what it's doing, and contribute improvements. Third, I've moved on to other projects and don't have the bandwidth to turn this into a commercial product, but I still think the idea is sound and could help people.

The code is now available on GitHub, and the service is free to use at auxlee.com. If you're a musician who collaborates remotely, or a developer interested in audio tools, check it out. If nothing else, maybe it'll save someone the headache of dealing with misaligned stems.

It never went anywhere as a startup, but maybe as an open source project it'll find the life it was supposed to have.