Studio Collect Plugin

The free Studio Collect Plugin enables smoother session data collection.

In the Golden Age of recording studios, second engineers played a crucial role- they kept the entire session organized and took detailed notes about the session participants and specific details of each session. Some of this handwritten information would travel with the recording on the back of the tape box and end up as liner notes on a released album cover.

The digital era transformed this process, democratizing recording. This meant leaner teams in the control room and more diverse, less systemic methods of recording and capturing recording information. The tradition of maintaining detailed notes was largely lost as the apprentice and mentoring routines in place that would train young engineers in this system dissolved.

Today when accurate and complete metadata are the key to distribution, discovery, and payment, the way recording data is gathered has become fragmented at the most basic level. The second engineer's craft has fallen by the wayside. More importantly, the reasons why this metadata is valuable has for many either been misunderstood or lost entirely.

VEVA Sound is changing this. SCP, a free plugin, is designed to work with any digital audio workstation and gather data about recording sessions, akin to a virtual second engineer.

VEVA created this plugin based on nearly two decades of working with producers, engineers and artists within studios, collecting metadata, preserving large catalogs, and working with major labels.

The SCP plugin supports recording engineers' data collection efforts as they work on a session in real time. Based on the international DDEX RIN standard, the plugin encourages engineers to input required fields. The plugin offers the option of generating and sharing a fully compliant RIN (recording information notification) as a PDF or XML file.

The plugin is the first part of the Studio Collect Suite that VEVA will roll out later this year, which will provide a wider, more powerful set of tools for managing data, files, and workflow in the recording studio. These files form the basis for all music metadata, this vital information that determines track credits, searchability, and royalty payments.