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Put ’Em Up

By Scott Healy | August, 2007

Say you’re a hired gun doing a few keyboard tracks on a song. You’ll get a rough mix, pop it into the computer, track a few parts, and upon approval, send out the final files. Or you could be the producer, commissioning other players — perhaps drummers, guitarists, wind players — to track remotely, and send the final tracks back to you for assembly into your final mix. Most of the time you’ll never meet face to face with your counterpart, yet somehow you still establish the important, intimate creative relationship through the exchange of bits and bytes. You need to know a few ways to accomplish sending audio files over the Internet, and a little planning and preparation can really pay off.

I got turned on to yousendit.com by a singer-songwriter I was producing. He’s a night owl, and he likes to cut guitar and vocal tracks in his closet (usually around 4 a.m.), then send them to me for review. Emailing MP3s back and forth was cool for sending quick bounces and ideas, but 16- or 24-bit tracks are way too big to email. With a free account on yousendit.com you can send files up to 100MB in size, and for $4.99 a month (as of publication) up to 2GB. The recipient (in this case me) gets a handy notification email with a link; click and you’re directed right to the correct page with your file. Simply download, import into your DAW, and you’re done. If you’re sending, you have to register; they want your email address as a username and you pick a password. They also offer many tiers of enhanced service for multiple uploads and more storage, plus a $29.95 per month business storage solution with some more advanced features like multiple client folders, a dropbox, and no advertising.

One player who I collaborate with frequently turned me on to using iChat to transfer files. Once I got over my initial hesitation to delve into the domain of gossiping teenage girls, I dug the realtime element. With instant messaging you can chat online while transferring mixes, MP3s, small videos, whatever. It moves quickly enough, and iChat in particular has a nice drag and drop interface. Both parties have to be online at the same time though, and you have to have a .mac or AIM account for iChat. Instant messaging does add a certain immediacy to the process though, and somehow seems more personal.

With larger companies I’ve dealt with, the workflow is fast and furious; they’ll have their own server dedicated to file exchange and a simple browser interface will provide you with uploading and downloading capabilities. Jingle houses in particular need to have lots of mixes, demos, voiceover tracks, and video files available for their composers to download and multiple folders, which is a way more complex task than a simple public upload site could ever manage. All you’re going to need here is a browser.

Many freelancers maintain their own websites on remote servers that have a password-protected client access area. This service is surprisingly affordable, although most will need someone to design and implement a client area. As your needs and your client list grows, you add folders and subfolders, you post files into them using your customized browser interface or, better yet, FTP software such as Fetch for Mac (fetchsoftworks.com, see Figure 1) or AbsoluteFTP for PC (www.vandyke.com). Your happy clients download at their leisure with their browser, and you upload and control the files, the folders, and everything else they see. If you’re considering making a business out of doing remote Internet recording and file transfer, it will really pay off to go this way; the flexibility and professional feel it affords is well worth the investment.

Physical Vs. Virtual

Depending on your Internet connection speed, it can take hours to upload large music files. I once got so bogged down trying to transfer multiple large drum tracks I finally gave up and hopped on the New York subway to head downtown to pick up a CD — yes, sometimes human contact is unavoidable — to get it done. FedEx and USPS may seem quaint, but they will also work, and it’s always great to have a hard copy of digital files.

Tips To Improve Your Workflow

Always consider the present and final format of the project. Is it in Pro Tools? DP? Do you work in the same DAW environment as your counterpart? It doesn’t really matter as long as your final product is full-resolution audio; AIFF or WAV are the most common file formats. You must agree on a sample format and rate — 24-bit, 44.1kHz, for example.

Keep all downloaded files on your local computer sorted by project and labeled in a way that’s obvious. Rename the files if you have to and use project folders with subfolders for roughs, finals, stems, video, etc.

If you’re sending tracks that are to be imported into a larger session or synced to video it’s imperative your tracks have a definitive start time. A musician might say, “This file starts at measure one,” but don’t assume the engineer or editor will understand. For commercials, some like to have a two-pop, or a little sonic blip pasted in the file exactly two seconds before the start of the song to line up the audio with the video. Film editors love a SMPTE start point using a project timecode reference.

In a multitrack environment, I’ve found the best way to avoid confusion is to have a true tempo count-off reference that follows the whole project from rough mixes to final stripes. Don’t forget that you, your client, or your collaborator might have lots of tracks coming in from different sources, and it must be absolutely clear where to place your audio in the session. Set up a click track in your DAW and record it to an audio track. Snip off two bars of it and paste it — in time — in front of all the tracks you send out, and ask your buds to do the same with any tracks they send back. Work with a tempo grid whenever possible to avoid track sync confusion.

If you’re recording to a reference track and your part doesn’t come in for a while, copy some of that reference track at the beginning of your final track to avoid confusion as to where the file should start. Delete the reference audio once everything lines up.

When you’re preparing your tracks to send over the Internet, keep your mono tracks mono. There’s no point in wasting space on stereo tracks that don’t need to be in stereo. Decide beforehand if you’re going to bounce with effects, and consider sending a reference mix along with dry final tracks so others may faithfully recreate your effects.

If you’re bouncing and sending lots of tracks for the same project, try to make them all exactly the same length, even if there is a lot of dead air in some tracks. It’s much easier to line up tracks visually once they’re all imported into a DAW. Remember, storage space is cheaper than paying for the time it’d take for someone to slide all of your tracks around!