The exchange of projects and its difficulty

[roderick]

(Cubase)

I'm sure some of you have done this, collaborated an the likes. Could anybody give me any tips that they've learned from passing projects to other people?

I'm aware of the logistical nature of having the resources required and whatnot but to me importing pieces of a project to another seems virtually ridiculous. If you attempt to load a second project to drag in parts it will attempt to load the projects VSTS and do dynamic switching between the two when you switch between views. The end result is a cold hard crash folks. You may get away with doing what you need to do but it will be messy all the way.

By the way, for me, if my audio driver crashes from cubase its a cold hard reboot I've got to do (STaudio CPORT). You can imagine how frustrating it might be knowing that you have to crash 1-X times just to collaborate with someone.

And I welcome anybody elses opinion on using a different host if another one supports this type of thing in a much better fashion.

[pitchdrifter]

• Use only vstis and effects both you and your collaborator(s) have.
• If you use different sound sources, bounce the track to wav and distribute that with the project, if theres a source midi track for it, keep but mute it, make sure its labeled accordingly.
• Dedicated ftp/webspace will help, keep a list of allowed fx and vsti's on there.
• Use a good archiver to upload complete packages (project file + audio tracks) - rar with best compression is useful, remove unused content before building the archive file.
• Compile a txt or htm file with the details about the package. Put it inside the respective package and upload it seperately as well. Stick to a clear naming convention for the package, the txt/htm and the project file, like e.g. projectname_yournick_date.
• Package and upload custom samples seperately from the project package, mention the filename and location in the txt/htm mentioned above.
• Use relative paths in your sample definition files instead of absolute ones.
• Use sticky note type of vst effect so everyone can easily make notes inside the project for the collaborator(s) to read.
• Use the phone or a messenger type app, collabs like that only work with sufficient communication going on.

hth

Markus

[efluon]

raven said almost all. "save project to new folder" will be clear to you i guess. instead of bouncing vsti/fx not existent you should be able to simply freeze all tracks. and if your staudio-driver makes problems, disable it before importing. (or get a newer driver? or disable mme/directx-access to it in windows control panel?)

[roderick]

All good tips and appreciate effort however unfortunately all very much already known. I was hoping that someone might have an answer regarding opening two projects or some fabulous "wonder app" that would make life easier for me to integrate.

After all, anything that he does has to somehow integrate with anything I do. We're going to have two versions of the project.

[pitchdrifter]

Don't work on the project until you get it back from your collaborator.

[Bas]

You could use the export selected track function to export only the changes that each person makes. It might keep the size of stuff being sent between the two down, and also should not be problematic with regard to different hardware outs etc.

[griels]

The only real solution as I see it is for sequencers to incorporate collaboration functions ala Rocket Network... Nuendo now does this for example. If someone were to create a subhost that supported online collaboration - including rearrangements and mixing automation - then that might be enough... Jorgen are you listening?

There is of course Digital Musician.Net, which makes the auditioning and synchronisation of recording a little more convenient, but it doesn't allow synchronisation of project rearrangements etc.

EDIT: thinking about it, a nice approach might be to use separate energy XT projects for each part of the project, then send a zip back and forth containing the updated parts only. In fact there's some software to automate this called DAWsync... See http://www.globalmusicalcollaboration.net/ for info..

[roderick]

Thanks for the info, I'm looking at dawsync tomorrow, bit too late in the night for this type of thing right now. Sounds as if its probably as close as I'm going to get to what I want for the moment.

[roderick]

After a lot of trouble I managed to make a version of my cubase that has no vsts in its plugin list.

This means it no longer crashes when opening multiple projects.

Dawsync sounded nice but now I can work on projects whilst my collaborator is. Integration will be a slight pain but atleast we can work in parallel now.