How do you share files among collaberators?

[EvelBist]

If you can't walk them over to the other guy's machine, how do you send large files to the other guy in a short time? I've tried DropBox, too slow to upload; emailing wont work w/ my attachment limit. Is there some cloud mechanism or do you ftp or what? thanks

[foobar93]

Gobbler is a music-specific sharing service. I've tried it on small things with reasonable success. It's supposed to integrate with Pro Tools and some other DAWs, too. https://www.gobbler.com/

[ken]

Google drive actually works pretty well. I find that sometimes the simplest methods are the easiest, which might mean trading mp3s instead of wavs.

Sometimes yousendit.com works well too.

Dropbox is one of the better ways as well.

Ken

[EvelBist]

Do you ever send entire projects to each other? For example - Reaper projects even simple ones can easily exceed 100Mb even zipped. That takes a long while on DSL.

[ken]

I sent an entire project to Starfinger. I consolidated all the tracks, zipped everything up, and uploaded it to Google Drive. It was about 10 stereo tracks.

The main thing is make sure you consolidate, trash any unused tracks, etc. You want to make the project as small as possible.

Ken

[HeuristicsInc]

i just send mp3s until it's time to mix and master. usually i use my own ftp space, but i've also used email and dropbox.
-bill

[fluffy]

Don't share the entire project as a .zip - instead, just share the individual tracks that you want people to play against. Better yet, have the person doing the engineering send a bounce of all the tracks together and then the individual contributors can send their isolated tracks that are recorded against that bounce.

Once upon a time I had a dream for a collaborative music authoring environment that was based on git's principles (which would have made it easy for people to share, collaborate, do sub-mixes, etc.) but I didn't have time to develop it on my own and it's hard to get places you work for to get interested in pet projects like those when they don't match their actual product area. Oh well.

[Billy's Little Trip]

Google drive actually works pretty well.

Google drive is great. I just started using it. Dee sends via drop box which seems to work fine. But being that all the people I collab with has gmail, Google drive just makes more sense now. You don't even have to find it, it finds you. If you are sending a file that's too big, it says, ooops, that file is too big for your gmail service, use Google Drive, and it pops up a drag and drop your file or search your computer option. Quick, easy and can send huge files up to 15GB free, which is great for what we do. I'm not sure of the cost if you want more GBs.

Also, while we're working on a song, I send MP3s to work from. Then when we are done, I ask everyone to send their parts as a wav file for the final mix.

[Caravan Ray]

Also, while we're working on a song, I send MP3s to work from. Then when we are done, I ask everyone to send their parts as a wav file for the final mix.

Does that really make a difference?

Whatever quality difference there is between WAV and MP3 - got to confess, I can't pick it. MP3 always seems fine to me.

[fluffy]

Also, while we're working on a song, I send MP3s to work from. Then when we are done, I ask everyone to send their parts as a wav file for the final mix.

Does that really make a difference?

Whatever quality difference there is between WAV and MP3 - got to confess, I can't pick it. MP3 always seems fine to me.

For a single downmix, there's no audible difference, but if you're mixing a whole bunch of tracks together, the little errors and artifacts can really add up. It's like making a copy of a copy, and in this case it's exacerbated because MP3 artifacts are also time-quantized.

As an analogy, let's say that you have a metronome playing in the background of every track. It's incredibly faint, to the point of being inaudible. Fine. But then you have that same incredibly faint metronome playing at the same time in 20 tracks. Suddenly when you mix everything together, that metronome is 20 times as loud, and is the only thing you can hear.

[Billy's Little Trip]

Also, while we're working on a song, I send MP3s to work from. Then when we are done, I ask everyone to send their parts as a wav file for the final mix.

Does that really make a difference?

Whatever quality difference there is between WAV and MP3 - got to confess, I can't pick it. MP3 always seems fine to me.

I can notice the difference on my high-end system in my truck with the snare hits and cymbals mostly, but not on my mediocre headphones. It would also bother me knowing I didn't have the original archived recordings not at the highest quality I can when it's so simple to do. If I ever go back to them to use on a CD or any other format that comes along, I have the best quality ready to go.

[fluffy]

I can notice the difference on my high-end system in my truck with the snare hits and cymbals mostly, but not on my mediocre headphones. It would also bother me knowing I didn't have the original archived recordings not at the highest quality I can when it's so simple to do. If I ever go back to them to use on a CD or any other format that comes along, I have the best quality ready to go.

Yeah, cymbals and other things with a wide frequency distribution (especially in treble) get absolutely destroyed by MP3 artifacts. They're always the first thing to go as the bitrate comes down.

It also makes a big difference for things with very deep bass when listened to on subwoofer systems.

Anecdotally, my younger cat can also tell the difference between vinyl and mp3. There's this one Beats Antique album that I listen to fairly regularly; if it's in mp3 she doesn't care, but if it's in vinyl, her ears go all twitchy because of all the crazy treble things. Not that that makes a practical difference to a human listener, but it does show that there's something being lost.