Project Management for music?

[4damind]

I have used Evernote for about 10 years to collect ideas (Nimbus by now). So also for preparing newsletters or posts on social media. I collected also ideas for track names, planned videos or other stuff in Evernote.
Some years ago I started to archive all finished tracks in Airtable (now I do it in Coda). Also with the corresponding attachments for advertising expenses or contracts.

I had never done any planning before, except for a few tasks and a grocery list in Todoist I had tried it in Trello with a Kanban Board, but I didn't like it that much. Later I did it in the free version of Asana (which works great) and meanwhile in ClickUp.

Out of interest... does anyone use a project management- or todo app to plan releases, band/artist stuff or as an archive for finished or licensed tracks?

[DJ Warmonger]

I use Trello for all my tasks (life, music, other stuff), sometimes also to note some plans for my daily job. Since then my productivity increased by a lot.

That's right, the boards grow even larger, but at the end of the day I always accomplish something and this helps me figure out what is the most important, easy or beneficial, or just what I would like to do at any given moment.

[telecode]

I use the notes in cubase extensively. That way my notes stay with the project. (you have to enable it in the settings as its not turned on by default IME). I also use the metadata fields in AT 4 for the presets.



I use Evernote and Kibana for my other work. Its good but I don't use it for music as I find I like the idea of keeping the notes with the song in the same place. Hence, I use the thing in the DAW.

[4damind]

I use Trello for all my tasks (life, music, other stuff), sometimes also to note some plans for my daily job. Since then my productivity increased by a lot.

That's right, the boards grow even larger, but at the end of the day I always accomplish something and this helps me figure out what is the most important, easy or beneficial, or just what I would like to do at any given moment.

Yes, Trello is great. But you don't have for every release or song a own board on Trello, only one board for all music stuff? With this typical more generic lists like ToDo, In Progress, Done...?
I remember that the company behind Trello bought the "Butler" tool. This was great for automating things but it was Afaik very limited in the free version..

[4damind]

I use the notes in cubase extensively. That way my notes stay with the project. (you have to enable it in the settings as its not turned on by default IME). I also use the metadata fields in AT 4 for the presets.



I use Evernote and Kibana for my other work. Its good but I don't use it for music as I find I like the idea of keeping the notes with the song in the same place. Hence, I use the thing in the DAW.

Right, I somehow always ignored this note function in Cubase. But it only allows unformatted text?

[telecode]

FWIW.. I work with a lot of "project managers" in my daily work. A lot of times they are full of ***t and have no idea what is going on b/c they are not really technologists. The other thing that keeps happening is, the management usually hire the project manager (management who are equally technically clueless) and they both apply their clueless heads together to try to steer and implement a highly complex technical project using a methodology that probably works great in a large construction project where you are building a high rise building that can fall on someones head. But when applying it to other projects always results in two things -- delays and documentation that is out of date and pretty much useless waste of space.

Kibana and variants comes up at times. I have tried them. If that sort of chart thing works for you -- then use it. All power to you. But if you find you are spending more time working on updating the chart to make it pretty than actually getting the work done -- drop it.

A couple of things I use that I think works better for my uses. Redmine and docuwiki and I break it down into top levels and and second and third tier levels. Easy to update as you go along. You could do something similar in music.

e.g.

-- $album_name
----- $song_name
--------$mix_stage
------------$mastering_stage

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wiki_software

[telecode]

FWIW.. I did try Kanban in OneNote a while ago. I have been using OneNote for a while and enjoy the product. It was cool idea but as always -- you have to spend time updating it and you have to keep a OneNote window app open all the time which uses up system resources while you are working. But worth a shot in you are a MS Office user. You could also probaly do something similar in Evernote.

https://stephenagrice.medium.com/how-to ... 9710a4d3dd

[donkey tugger]

I've got this file;

las.jpg

I even had a look at it the other day.

[satYatunes]

I agree Trello free version is limited. I recently did some research on these type of tools and tried Asana and Jira. I find them bit too much for an individual or small teams. I am sticking with Trello for now for simplicity. Too many features are distracting. Like telecode said at times I spent more times on working the tool than other way around. I use Onenote for all note taking, research, etc. Dropped Evernote once Microsoft made Onenote free. One good thing about Trello is they have a nice desktop app.

[4damind]

Yes, there are a lot of tools, but many of them are simply too overloaded or rather meant for teams. I have also worked with Asana and found it very usable. Especially since the free version is sufficient for many people and you can now switch between list and board (that didn't work back then).

With Trello it is also good that you can work with different checklists and it also handles attachments very well. Especially with music I find it interesting if you can also embed other pages like Soundcloud or Youtube directly or even attach smaller files

[Chapelle]

---

[DJ Warmonger]

I use Trello for all my tasks (life, music, other stuff), sometimes also to note some plans for my daily job. Since then my productivity increased by a lot.

That's right, the boards grow even larger, but at the end of the day I always accomplish something and this helps me figure out what is the most important, easy or beneficial, or just what I would like to do at any given moment.

Yes, Trello is great. But you don't have for every release or song a own board on Trello, only one board for all music stuff? With this typical more generic lists like ToDo, In Progress, Done...?

Well, I'm a single producer, not a label. I just put a bullet list for every production. Then set another card for release and promotion. Once it's signed, I simply wait for the label to schedule a release and then I post some news in social media and blogs.

But then, I run a blog, recently got a Youtube channel, and also keep learning and trying new stuff. Shopping lists and plans are also here. There's always a lot to do

[JoeCat]

I've switched between Trello and Evernote so many times I've lost count. The problem for me is that they both have their strengths and weaknesses and neither works well enough for me. Someday I may roll my own...

I love the drag/drop of Trello and the ability to visualize everything on a board at once. However, Trello sucks for notes (no WYSIWYG), and the cards are filled with useless buttons and info (even though you can hide some of it now). But Evernote is only fair at task management (although I use color coding and tags or priorities and that helps).

IMHO the problem is that the money in these apps is in team management, and so there have been few workflow and UI improvements over the years.

Guess that was no help lol. But honestly, except for cloud saves, I don't find them that much better than when I just used spreadsheets

[4damind]

Yes, there are so many different ways and even the analoge version with paper and pen (like the mentioned Bullet Journal) can work great.
This is partly like a science, there are a lot of people who deal with project and task management, give seminars and write books on how to plan and which apps to use etc.

I use a combination of list and board view.
This is e.g. the board view of all tasks and subprojects (ClickUp)


This is the list view only of the tracks (ClickUp).


And here is a task with a embedded note from Nimbus (similar to Evernote).

[JoeCat]

...I use a combination of list and board view.
This is e.g. the board view of all tasks and subprojects (ClickUp)

ClickUp looks great (and has a proper dark mode!) - but back to the same problem with Trello, where you need to link/embed with another app (Nimus, Evernote, etc.) to get proper notes on a card.

Most of the time, I'm just storing related hyeperlinks to a project for information, etc., and obviously you can do that in Trello, but it's not as simple as proper notetaking apps.

I've toyed with OneNote too, and since I don't need more than a few priority tags (and generally need todo lists but not a kanban fanatic) it works as well. But not terribly enamored by the interface (the Office version seemed better).

Can't make me happy!

Should we talk about DAWs next lol? (Ableton - just put an audio gain right on a clip like ProTools and I'll pay you double for an upgrade!)