Need Help Sharing Files Between Studios...

[hakim]

Hi All,

I recently acquired a music production partnership with another company in Atlanta, GA. The company in GA is run by an older man, a composer and producer who's top most success was in the 80s pop era. He only uses DAW like a tape machine so he is not prolific with it.

Anyway, I recently produced a rhythm track for some of his clients in Atlanta but sent it to him as an .mp3 file. I expect that he merely imported the .mp3 into Digital Performer 3 and recorded the vocals and instruments parts on separate tracks.

Now most of the work we will be doing is music for productions, and the quality will need to be pristine. I imagine there is a better way to do this file sharing thing without utilizing terabytes of HD space. Any ideas on how best to share files between us?

He is using Digital Performer 3 and I am using Cubase 4.

[aortizjr]

Well really it isn't as much space as you might think. For 16-Bit 44.1Khz wav files, it is about 10 MB a minute. So depending on where the final mix will be, you can do a mixdown as a wav and send that.

Anyway there are lots of options with sub-mixes or rough mixes and sending the files around.

Worst case scenario is sending all the tracks as a separate .wav. You want all the edits and such done. That is what really can eat up space.

Even with high speed internet and such, the transfer times will be huge.

I personally use RAR compression and put it on DVD's. Then snail-mail it. With RAR you can have it even break up the RAR to fit on DVD's perfectly. Then when it is decompressed it also does a check-sum to make sure the decompressed files are 100% correct.

You can probably mail back and forth an external HD too. They are cheap enough these days. But I think DVD's are still safer, cheaper per batch, but more expensive/wasteful in the long run, as in a lot of projects.

After compressing with RAR, I have never had a session span more than 2 DVD's in 24-bit 44.1K after all the edits were done and the project Archived in cubase.

[hakim]

Originally Posted by aortizjr

I personally use... compression and put it on DVD's. Then snail-mail it.

You know, that is the same suggestion my new partner had. I just thought he might be old fashioned but perhaps it is still the better way.

[soundsundergroun]

ftp

[The Byre]

MP3 files are of low quality.

The standard is WAV files that start and finish at the same point and are free of gaps (export - fill silence).

You can aslo use broadcast WAV files that have their timings embedded in them.

You can either ftp them, or send DVDs or CDs.

[mcguin]

how about Digi Delivery??
We have one we might sell if interested??

Dan
ISW Studios, St. Thomas Virgin Islands

[FeatheredSerpent]

There are some decent compression tools out there, one of the best lossless formats I've found for audio specific stuff is Monkey's Audio

Monkey's Audio - a fast and powerful lossless audio compressor

it will compress wavs so you can realise a 50% reduction in file size, I haven't compared this to RAR compression though.

[dan p]

I've done this a lot lately.
Make wav's and make sure you record from beat 1 measure 1 with the tempos as part of your naming of the file.
For posting i have a .me account at apple and i can post on my own website as well.I use two in case one is not working.I've done my last two library cd's this way delivering the files to one of the two sites and having my engineer in this case download from his studio 45 minutes away from where i live.Then he finishes the mix's and sends me mp3's to check.I take the full quality cd's and make copies to send to prospective clients.
All electronic and from the comfort of my own studio!Good Day Ay!

Dan P

[aortizjr]

Originally Posted by FeatheredSerpent

There are some decent compression tools out there, one of the best lossless formats I've found for audio specific stuff is Monkey's Audio

Monkey's Audio - a fast and powerful lossless audio compressor

it will compress wavs so you can realise a 50% reduction in file size, I haven't compared this to RAR compression though.

I like Monkey's Audio too. But I found that it only worked for me on 16-bit 44.1 files. Anything else and it just errored on me :( This was a few months ago with 24-bit 44.1 files. May have been fixed or it was a bug.

Monkey's Audio is free too which is sweet.

RAR I get about a 40% reduction or 60% of the original file size at Normal compression. Takes a good hour or so per session of 40 minutes of music 30 tracks or so. But I get it down to 1 and a half DVD's usually. So that leaves some room to put rough mixes or whatever on there as well.

You can try 7zip too, which is free. RAR you get a 30 day trial, then it is like $25 or something.

[Radiogal]

This one is great!!!
Sprend

[rack gear]

just finished a year long project w/ many people over a lot of spaces - same issues - we used:

YouSendIt - Send large files - transfer delivery - FTP Replacement

it's genius

[emdub123]

Here's what I use for sharing .wav files remotely:

Simple private real-time sharing and collaboration by drop.io

[Me2]

Originally Posted by hakim

Hi All,

I recently acquired a music production partnership with another company in Atlanta, GA. The company in GA is run by an older man, a composer and producer who's top most success was in the 80s pop era. He only uses DAW like a tape machine so he is not prolific with it.

Anyway, I recently produced a rhythm track for some of his clients in Atlanta but sent it to him as an .mp3 file. I expect that he merely imported the .mp3 into Digital Performer 3 and recorded the vocals and instruments parts on separate tracks.

Now most of the work we will be doing is music for productions, and the quality will need to be pristine. I imagine there is a better way to do this file sharing thing without utilizing terabytes of HD space. Any ideas on how best to share files between us?

He is using Digital Performer 3 and I am using Cubase 4.

I'm presuming that he has a Mac (Digital Performer is Mutu). If it is an Apple or other PC type based DAW set up you might want to consider something like using SFTP over SSH with self-signed certificates (secure file copy over an encrypted channel) to copy across the raw WAV files over the Internet. SSH is "free". You can certainly run SSHD on an Apple and the SSH client is built in as standard. In windows you can use Putty as an SFTP client or cygwin for a server. Internet bandwidth is cheap nowadays ($50 per month?), as are firewire/USB disks ($100 for 1TB). You can then arrange your work in directories with something like an 'in' and 'out' box on each side for each project, and automatically copy the files across regularly using a batch file. It'll just take a few minutes to sync up. see OpenSSH Mac OS X: Sharing your files with non-Apple computers


Try doing that sort of instant multi-state collaboration with an analogue tape



Be sure to disable plain text password based login in sshd and only allow key based log in: see example config below, Key elements to check for in your config file are "Protocol 2", "PermitRootLogin no", "ChallengeResponseAuthentication no" and "PasswordAuthentication no"

The line "Port 1022" allows incoming connections on a non-standard port. You'll probably need to set up port forwarding on your home/studio firewall connection to send that inbound traffic through the NAT box to your DAW.

more /etc/sshd_config
# Package generated configuration file
# See the sshd(8) manpage for details

# What ports, IPs and protocols we listen for
Port 22
# for NAT from outside
Port 1022

# Use these options to restrict which interfaces/protocols sshd will bind to
#ListenAddress ::
#ListenAddress 0.0.0.0
Protocol 2
# HostKeys for protocol version 2
HostKey /etc/ssh/ssh_host_rsa_key
HostKey /etc/ssh/ssh_host_dsa_key
#Privilege Separation is turned on for security
UsePrivilegeSeparation yes

# Lifetime and size of ephemeral version 1 server key
KeyRegenerationInterval 3600
ServerKeyBits 768

# Logging
SyslogFacility AUTH
LogLevel INFO

# Authentication:
# LoginGraceTime 120
LoginGraceTime 20

# do not allow root login
PermitRootLogin no

# only allow me and you
AllowUsers me you
StrictModes yes

RSAAuthentication yes
PubkeyAuthentication yes
#AuthorizedKeysFile %h/.ssh/authorized_keys

# Don't read the user's ~/.rhosts and ~/.shosts files
IgnoreRhosts yes
# For this to work you will also need host keys in /etc/ssh_known_hosts
RhostsRSAAuthentication no
# similar for protocol version 2
HostbasedAuthentication no
# Uncomment if you don't trust ~/.ssh/known_hosts for RhostsRSAAuthentication
#IgnoreUserKnownHosts yes

# To enable empty passwords, change to yes (NOT RECOMMENDED)
PermitEmptyPasswords no

# Change to yes to enable challenge-response passwords (beware issues with
# some PAM modules and threads)
ChallengeResponseAuthentication no

# Change to no to disable tunnelled clear text passwords
#PasswordAuthentication yes
PasswordAuthentication no

# Kerberos options
#KerberosAuthentication no
#KerberosGetAFSToken no
#KerberosOrLocalPasswd yes
#KerberosTicketCleanup yes

# GSSAPI options
#GSSAPIAuthentication no
#GSSAPICleanupCredentials yes

X11Forwarding no
X11DisplayOffset 10
PrintMotd no
PrintLastLog yes
TCPKeepAlive yes
#UseLogin no

#MaxStartups 10:30:60
#Banner /etc/issue.net
Banner /etc/ssh/banner.txt

# Allow client to pass locale environment variables
AcceptEnv LANG LC_*

Subsystem sftp /usr/lib/openssh/sftp-server

UsePAM yes


For audio file compression FLAC gets good platform support and is lossless. see http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=Lossless_comparison#Comparison_Table

[Croaker]

Originally Posted by redvelvetstudios

just finished a year long project w/ many people over a lot of spaces - same issues - we used:

YouSendIt - Send large files - transfer delivery - FTP Replacement

it's genius

same here....love usendit