The move from analog to digital music recording and
production is certainly one of the most fundamental things to happen to
music. We’ve moved from a world where multitrack
recording required a significant infrastructure investment, to fitting an
entire studio on a laptop (and increasingly, a tablet or a phone). We now have an entire generation of musicians
for whom nonlinear editing systems are the norm, rather than some futuristic
technology running on a dedicated desktop system at that studio you can’t quite
afford to record at.
So what’s next? Well,
once you have the ability for music to be encapsulated in digital files and
loaded in a Digital Audio Workstation (or DAW), you lower the barrier to
collaboration. However, until recently,
collaboration has required carrying or mailing music on a portable hard drive
or other physical media, long copy times, and sometimes hours of trolling
through hard drives looking for a particular version of a file that got
corrupted along the way. Chances are
that if you’re a digital musician, you have people in your town, a town across
the country, or another country an ocean away that you would like to share the
music making process with. How do you
get started and what should you think about?
Read on!
NOTE: We work in
Ableton Live, so we’ll be referencing specific commands and functionality that
apply to Ableton, though the principles we’re discussing apply to any DAW.
Our story
For Cats Cradle Robbers, we got into remote collaboration in
a roundabout, organic way. We didn’t
have a clear vision for what we wanted out of the process at first. For us music was something we worked on in
person, and huddling over one laptop “pair programming” was the only thing that
made sense to us. At that time, we were
learning how to create together, coming up with methodologies, musical forms,
and ways of communicating.
As we worked together, it started to make more sense to
introduce some division of labor. Snake
would ask DJSE to copy a project onto a portable hard drive so that he could
work on a project offline. Typically,
DJSE was doing the bulk of the sound design and recording, and Snake would work
on the broad structure of a track to shape an arrangement, taking the raw
samples and turning them into something musically coherent. It made the best use of our individual skills
at the time.
However, copying large projects was time consuming and
error-prone. Files would go missing, especially
before we discovered “Collect all and save,” or we’d copy more files than
needed, including and ultimately duplicating portions of factory packs. It was a mess!
So, we thought about harnessing the power of the
Internet. Here are some of the things we
tried over the years:
Solution
|
Pros
|
Cons
|
Emailing .als files with changes
|
Simple - .als files are small, and as long as your changes are
confined to the .als, it works fine.
|
Doesn’t work if you’ve cropped, reversed or frozen files, added new
samples, and unless you are working with identical hard drive layouts, always
results in having to scan for missing media files.
|
Real-time collaboration using videoconferencing (Skype, Hangouts,
GoToMeeting, Join.me + Phone)
|
Good for interactive communication and show-n-tell sessions.
|
Doesn’t fit well with remote recording of new audio tracks (for
Totally Frigid, which we started out during a Skype session, Snake was
recording guitar tracks and emailing the files to DJSE for inclusion: it was
a painful process)
|
File-sharing services (Dropbox, OneDrive)
|
Fine for small projects
|
Our projects can get to 3gb or more in size – requires long transfer
times and paid Dropbox accounts on both ends to share in both directions.
|
Version control systems (we tried Github)
|
Works well for file copy of small to medium projects
|
We ran up against disk quota limitations when trying to use
Github. We made do by stripping out
factory packs, but that was a very hands-on process. Git is not fond of handling large files (something
they are up front about). Also,
the benefits of Git for diffing and merging text files don’t work for .als,
so for this purpose it is basically a glorified FTP service.
|
Private FTP
|
Can handle arbitrarily large transfers, completely under your
control. Like copying to a hard drive,
but you don’t have to be in the same place at the same time.
|
Like copying to a hard drive, only slower.
|
The mote in thine eye
One key need of collaborators who are separated in space and
time is a way to discuss and agree on changes that need to be made, and to
track those changes to completion.
Coming from a software background, we see this as equivalent to the process
of filing, triaging, and fixing bugs in software. It’s also similar to the process in theater
in which a director gives “notes”. In
fact, we refer to these annotations as “motes” (short for Music Notes), and
it’s a key part of our process: one of
us renders our latest version of a shared track, and both collaborators provide
their “motes” or comments on what they like and what they would like to
change.
There are several aspects of this that are important:
- The music has to be posted someplace where everyone can hear it
- There has to be a way to communicate the motes
- There has to be a way to track the status of the motes
While we have yet to find a system that fills all off these
requirements, we’ve managed to make do, using SoundCloud or Splice to annotate
precise points in the music that we want to call attention to, and tracking
progress against those comments in e-mail and using online documents (typically
OneNote and Excel Online with documents saved in a shared OneDrive folder). Nobody has yet provided a way to combine
annotations with issue tracking in a way that would satisfy all facets of our
workflow.
 |
| Soundcloud annotations provide a way of anchoring motes to specific moments in the track. |
Online Community meets Collab Software
Only in the last handful of years has software started to
catch up to the need that we’ve been filling using a series of stopgaps. Here’s a survey of a few that we’ve tried and
a few newcomers that we haven’t.
Splice
DJSE found the crew from Splice at SxSW this year, and the
Splice software has become an integral part of our production toolkit. While their DAW support is limited so far (Ableton
Live, FL Studio, Logic Pro, and GarageBand), we’ve found that their approach to
project collaboration matches the way we work to a tee. We used Splice to build our latest album Seen
and Unseen, and we were pleased to be featured
in their blog when we released Laudanum Escapade for remixing on their
site.
The features in Splice that we find most useful are:
- Version tracking (every save in Ableton is tracked as a version, and you choose which versions are flagged as important. Every version can be annotated and have a separate audio preview)
- Unlimited storage (with the sample-heavy tracks that we build, our projects can grow to as large as 6gb!)
- The DNA player: a visualization of the Ableton project structure that allows annotation on each track
 |
| The powerful and versatile Splice DNA player, showing track-specific annotations |
While Splice works for both Mac (DJSE’s platform of choice)
and Windows (like Snake’s Windows 8 system), the Mac client seems more
robust. The Windows client can be a
resource hog when uploading changes, and the Splice window can’t be minimized
when activated. We’ve also found that
the version tree can get confused when working with multiple versions of the
same project on one computer. Still,
Splice is the closest match to our requirements, and we’re happily using it
today. We’ve found the Splice team
professional and receptive to feedback, so who knows, perhaps we’ll have
everything we need within a few versions.
Blend
 |
| The Blend.io project list |
Before we got onto Splice, we tried out blend.io, another
collaboration site. Like Splice, Blend
works with standard DAWs – they handily beat Splice in the number of DAWs
supported – and both systems allow working with raw stems. Blend supports versioning as well, though
versioning in Blend is not so granular:
a new version is created only when pulling the project explicitly.
Blend seems like a good choice when your main goal is to
share music with the community – their system encourages sharing and
collaborating publicly. However, if you
are looking to collaborate privately, their hard limit of 3 private projects is
a buzzkill. Also, their version tracking
is confusing – it can be difficult to understand which version of a project you’re
looking at. Finally, Blend uses Dropbox
for storage and sync, which limits the size of your projects. If you go over the 2gb space limit in the
basic account, then all collaborators using that project need to pony up for
the pro account. Even with small
projects, Dropbox’s file locking will block you from saving while files are
uploading. If you save frequently, this
quickly becomes an annoyance.
Blend offers no way to annotate the project or the audio
directly, so you’ll need another method to track your feedback.
DAWs that come with collaboration build in
Ohm Studio and Soundtrap are taking a from-the-ground-up
approach to online collaboration by creating new DAWs that support all of the
online collaboration features you need.
While we haven’t spent much time playing with these tools, the marketing
materials and into videos seem compelling and for entry-level musicians, this
seems like a great option for starting out. Only time will tell whether these
tools evolve into something with the complexity and power of Ableton Live or
ProTools. Building a DAW to meet the
needs of professional producers is a daunting prospect. Ohm Studio, a client side DAW, seems closer
to that track. Soundtrap is an
online-only tool and seems more oriented to beginning producers who want a
quick and easy solution to build loops using prebuilt pieces.
Of course, we can all hope that Ableton and ProTools come up
with their own built-in collaboration system, either alone or in collaboration
with Splice or another partner who can handle the storage and service layer of
the system. In the meantime, we can
count on companies like Blend and Splice to work hard to bridge the gaps.
Doing it in Real time
Where all of the systems mentioned so far shine is in their
ability to enable asynchronous collaboration.
But what about synchrony? Is it
possible to link musicians in physically distant locations and work out the complexities
of latency so that they can record new tracks in real time?
While we’ve tried some limited experiments, we haven’t found
it necessary to move beyond asynchronous collaboration. I’ll defer to SoundOnSound for a discussion
of the state of the art as of about a year ago:
http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/mar14/articles/remote-collaboration.htm
.
Into the future
With demanding day jobs and evolving families (DJSE is in
the throes of discovering the joy of fatherhood as Snake types this article), our
music is increasingly dependent on software to make
everything faster and easier. Cats
Cradle Robbers’ next release will be largely built in the cloud, by two busy
dudes who are trying hard to snatch bits of free time when they can. Splice and other online tools will be a big
part of that process.
 |
| DJSE and DJ1Z |
Next up…
So you have a project and one or more collaborators. Some of you are on PC, some on Mac. One of you has a cool new plugin that the
others can’t afford. How do you put it
all together? Stay tuned for our next
article!
