You know what's a great game? Tracking the lifelines of all your favorite samples throughout time.We already have WhoSampled, the site that uses crowd-sourced knowledge to dissect the musical DNA of hip-hop and electronic tracks. And soon we may have Derive, the mobile app which developer James Rice says can streamline many of WhoSampled's functions for a better user experience."Derive is my evolutionary vision for WhoSampled," Rice says in his description of the prototype. "[It's] stripping back, re-grouping and relaunching." One of Derive's biggest upgrades is that it's made to connect to the cloud. While the WhoSampled app can scan the music on your phone as part of its sample-tracking process, Derive will also allow you to deconstruct tracks you pick from streaming services like Spotify.
The app also offers a more fluid interface that can easily skip from one song to another, and then move between the different samples contained within a given track. Rice refers to it as "a pure listening experience" rather than the "analytical listening style" of the WhoSampled app. "Derive resonates music for the new breed of teens and trendy twenty-somethings who love to discover new music," he explains. "It finds a common thread—between music they know, and music they may not know—through analyzing what samples those songs use."
Derive is still in prototype mode, so if you're interested in learning about the nuts and bolts of how it will all work, head over to Rice's full write-up on Medium.Max Pearl is a nerd for samples. Follow him on Twitter: @maxpearl
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