You may recall, in Mixing the Audio Stream I was closing in on the trail of the Virtual Recording Studio, and I left off in hot pursuit of the audio Grail, a fully-equipped recording studio ready to go on the Internet. The next - and for the moment, last - stop is Rocket Network which is about as close to that dream as current technology allows.

I've had my eye on this clever bunch ever since they began on a shoestring as ResRocket a few years ago, with a technology that allowed stacking of MIDI files by multiple parties across the Net to make a joint musical effort. There was a lot of promise there, but you can only go so far with MIDI, which by its nature is artificially produced music. Sorry folks, but a programmed synth doesn't hold a candle to a live musician.

Well, in April 1998, ResRocket's founders -- British musicians Willy Henshall and Tim Bran, and American software developers and musicians, Canton Becker and Matt Moller -- ran into Paul Allen who blessed them with oodles of bread and Rocket Network was born, capable of fully professional-quality recording of real-live musicians.

Actually, it was the folks at Mixman and Beatnik that pointed me in the direction of the newly-revamped company, saying that it was the final high-end Internet recording studio technology, which indeed it is. But is it the longed for virtual recording studio where you can sign on, do a count-off, and lay down tracks with other musicians across the world for a modest rental fee?

That's what I asked Sara Perkins, their public relations manager, who in a clipped British accent explained:

"We are a business-to-business company. We lease Internet Recording Studios to other companies that already have software or hardware that we can build into. They Rocket power their products which then gives their customers who already have access to their products access to our network of recording studios. At the moment our third parties are audio companies, but ultimately the concept extends way beyond that, it's very much multimedia. So the first companies that are offering internet recording studios are Steinberg, via Cubase. The only thing that's different on it would be that you have a little Rocket button on it, which means you can post tracks to our server which holds master arrangements of any audio that's been created. Anybody that's in that shared space can upload and receive and send files all in order, they pop up on their screen, you can work together on the same piece of audio. Cubase is the first, the second is Emagic's Logic, and they're going to be selling studios on HarmonyCentral.com. We sell groups of studios as studio centers to our partners, who are basically online resellers, and they can brand the Internet Recording Studio and sell or lease them to their existing communities of users."

George Bernard Shaw once quipped that America and Britain are two cultures separated by a common language. So let me translate: