Online Collaboration?

A few months back, I read in a thread here, that there is a way for two people to work on a song using the Internet and they gave a link to a site that the two parties would log on to and basically share a file so that as one person works on the song, when he's done he puts it in a file then when I want to work on it I just open the file. Does anyone remember that site?

Thanks.
Mike

+1 for Box.net. Stay away from XDrive. They give you 5GB for free for uploads & downloads, but the transfer speed is horrific. Took me 2hrs. to download a 46MB file from them the other day ( I have DSL pro too). Some of these sites will put the freebie stuff last on the list, while giving more bandwidth to the paying customers. I guess it's just business.

Hey thanks Deef!

I've been looking around for just this sort of site.

I don't need loads of Gigs but enough to transfer reasonable size Wave files or maybe Cakewalk Bundle files if that format is supported.

I've been swapping mp3's as e-mail attachments up till now and converting them back into waves to work on in Guitar Tracks.

Already signed up - nice one - cheers!

Steve



[Edit - tpyo]

Also consider setting up your own FTP server. Admittedly that's only practical if you have a static IP and aren't behind a firewall, so it's not for everyone. But if you have (or can get from your ISP) a fixed IP address there are several free FTP servers available - I use one called Cerberus.

Find out your IP address. If it begins with 192, 172 or 10 you can't set up an FTP server. If DHCP is enabled (control panel -> network -> TCP/IP) you can't easily set up an FTP server. Windows firewall (or ZoneAlarm or anything like that) is not a problem, in fact it's essential if you're setting up a server.

Mike,

You could still pretty easily set up a firewall. It would take a few steps and some frustration problably, but a 192.x.x.x address only means that you are on a "private network". You have what's called NAT (network address translation) that happens between you and the public internet - this is performed by your router (DSL modem, wireless maybe, etc, but you have one if you have a 192.x.x.x address.

Giving yourself a static IP address on a private network is really easy - setting up a rule on your router should be pretty simple also so that it can redirect inbound traffic to the appropriate inside computer. Let me know if you want to try to do all this.

But also know that there are security issues to deal with as well. Remember that you are opening up a hole to your inside network. There are things that people can do once in there, so you have to not publicize that you have it open and only open the hole for time periods that you expect your collaborators to want to be able to get in - otherwise, you will likely become a porn or warez dumping ground.

It's cheap enough to get your own web hosting as an option also, or get some free space from somewhere like SkyDrive (Microsoft - 1 GB free) or one of the others that people have mentioned.

Also, checkout www.artistcollaboration.com It's gone a lot quieter over there than it has been in the past. You could also check out http://www.musicianscollaboration.com/forum/index.php which is a newer one with some members from a number of the old ones. I am a member there, but I've honestly not ever checked in - haven't had the time.

Hope that helps.

ejamming is kewl also.

Another thing to keep in mind is that you don't need to use wav files for collaboration.

For the creation steps, you can use wma files for the respective "beds" that you want to send back and forth, each with the part added in the mix as appropriate. When you are done with the tracking, decide who is going to mix it. This person will need all the "wav" files, but you can use another step to shrink those. Check out "monkeys audio" .ape compression format. You can get this as a free plugin to the free dbpoweramp application. This will let you make "ape" files of your wavs, which are lossless but compressed. They can't be played back until "un-aped", but they retain all their original quality and reduced file size. For example, a stereo "toms" track that I may record would typically be about 45mb or so, where using ape, because of all the time my toms are not being played, I get down to about 9mb for those. Not everything is that dramatic, but it's certainly worth the extra step for both saving space and upload time.

Uhhh.....Dohhhh! I just went and checked one of my song files again because I find it hard to believe that they're 3 to 4GB's. Well it turns out that there's numerous versions in each folder and each one is like 2MB .

This changes everything

Mike

Yeah. I did a lot of reading on this Adam. And since I'm not really computer literate it scared the hell out of me. This is exactly what I'm afraid of.

Mike

ORIGINAL: AdamFH

...but once your files are gone, they're gone.

Not if you make sure to keep backup copies on your local drive - you should ALWAYS do this no matter what form of file sharing you're using.

The most common "local only" IP addresses are of the form

192.168.x.x
172.16.x.x through 172.31.x.x
10.x.x.x