An early, scrappy, proof-of-concept toolset to run your own private Endlesss server for multiplayer musical jamming.
Naturally, this project is not endorsed or sponsored by Endlesss Ltd. Do they even legally exist anymore? Regardless: Use responsibly, at your own risk.
With the closure of Endlesss Ltd. in May 2024, the collaborative music tool they had created over the previous 6 years became inoperable, cut off from the cloud services. A community that had sprung up around the Endlesss tools and workflow were not satisfied with such a bleak and final outcome for what was, for many of us, a vital piece of creative software.
OUROCOSM ensures that Endlesss lives up to its name, providing an open-source self-hosting solution that will work with unmodified Endlesss Studio client software, forever.
While still early in development, OUROCOSM has proven to be fairly capable; a popular Endlesss community has been successfully running their own private server with 50+ registered users, over 10k riffs, jamming regularly and reliably for over a month at time of writing.
OUROCOSM builds upon the considerable work done on the OUROVEON toolset, a set of deep archival and live broadcast tools written to expand Endlesss' powers. We've been poking at Endlesss and its unpublished endpoints for years.
This project provides guidance and custom tools to provision a self-contained Endlesss-compatible suite of services as well as a client-side tool that makes applying the non-invasive patches required to get Endlesss Studio talking to our own servers.
Reasons why you might want to do such a thing:
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You want to jam with your friends again! It sucks when companies explode and all their closed-source cloud-only tools stop working.
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You want control over your jams and your data. Endlesss Ltd. shutting down locked out hundreds of users from years of their creations with a single week's warning. Running your own server ensures you own and control your data - and OUROCOSM has great support for exporting directly into OUROVEON LORE for completely offline browsing and long-term archival.
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You want to use Endlesss in a live performance setting where internet may be spotty or absent entirely - ideally we can provision an OUROCOSM server on a low-power device such as a Raspberry Pi and have a roving, cloud-free way to do 'local jamming'
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It's 2077 and you're a renegade music archeologist looking for insights into 2020-era collaborative improvisation, back before AI just made all the music for you.
To connect to private servers, we modify the execution environment of a launched application to redirect Endlesss' code. ocConnect offers a simple, shiny UI to let users pick custom servers, add hosts (eg. other DAWs to host the Endlesss VST) and boot the connection. It is written in Flutter and runs on Windows and MacOS.
- MacOS (notarised) and Windows builds
- Data-driven, multi-server support
- Continuous server reachability and time-sync readings
- Support for launching Endlesss Studio or any other suitable plugin host with private server binding
- "One Click" support for erasing
localEndlesss session data to support switching between servers - Quake-style central master-server hosting of private server listings vs. app-bundled server data
Out of the three core cloud services Endlesss relies upon - a CouchDB instance, an S3 store and a custom API server - ocServer provides the latter, a web server that handles a portion of the full Endlesss API, enough to get back to jamming. It also offers built-in tools for managing OUROCOSM servers, such as exporting jam backups, adding new jams, etc. It is written in Go and therefore will run on basically anything.
- API: auth/login flow
- API: public jam manifests, front-page broadcast
- API: private jam manifests
- API: profile view
- API: profile edit (partial)
- API: sample sound pack persistence
- API: joining / leaving jams
- API: riff deletion capability
- Tool: provision CouchDB instance from scratch
- Tool: create new jams on demand
- Tool: create new users on demand
- Tool: export jam to LORE archival format (metadata + stems)
- Tool: export of personal jams
- Tool: automatic export and upload with private/personal jam permissions logistics
We have also not yet designed the process for opening up jam and user creation to private groups, eg. via a web interface.
Due to iOS security, we cannot current patch the environment to make the mobile version of Endlesss talk to other servers. I don't anticipate this being possible without jail-breaking.
Full documentation for a from-scratch server setup is ongoing, alongside additions to the ocServer tools to make this more streamlined. Documentation will arrive in INFRA.md