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On 1 maj 2007, at 02.39, Michael Plishka wrote: > I am trying to record with someone a couple thousand miles away. > What does this fair group suggest? > 1. Doing my part of the recording and sending the CD or emailing > the files? > 2. Using software and synching up live? Hi Michael, In the nineties I pioneered Rocketnet as part of the beta testing team and learned the basics of long distance collaboration. Rocketnet was a great system that connected DAWS over the internet, via a dedicated audio file storage server. I could produce recordings together with other musicians, no matter who was using ProTools, Logic or Cubase. Any freshly recorded track was uploaded to the server and downloaded for monitoring in a compressed format to those that had joined that specific session. Although Rocketnet never reached financial break even and sadly went belly up, the basic needs for long distance collaboration remains the same: Each collaborator need to (1) receive a monitoring cue mix and (2) submit his own recorded track. For monitoring any stereo file of a suitable project mix is fine. For submitting your latest recorded track you should decide on a format with the best fidelity that works well with all collaborator's DAW system. You can send the files on DVD's or via an online file transfer. With the www.yousendit.com service FLAC has proven to work well for lossless audio file compression. FLAC supports Mac and Windows equally well. RAR can also be used, but I like FLAC better because its handling of files is much faster in OS X. Remember to always start every audio file at bar one, so whatever DAW anyone is using all tracks will sound in sync related to each other, no matter what tempo setting is used locally in the DAW application or multi track tape machine. Just line up the starting points of all files. My ongoing collaboration project runs at 24 bit files of 44100 kHz sampling rate, stereo or mono depending on what is recorded. Regarding "syncing up" it all depends on the music. For my ongoing project we play by ear and rely on our own sense of timing. But as you know, there is always a tempo thread going on in the back of your mind, even if you play totally freely. What I do, at the mixing stage, is to identify that tempo and adjust the DAW's tempo grid according to it. This has to be done by ear for best musical result. The difference is to simply go from "feeling the tempo" (as a musician) to "knowing the tempo" (as a producer). You may not think that you need it, but I have often found it useful for subtle stuff like for example bringing in tempo synced soft tremolo of a reverb return etc. It can be more explicitly useful if you may want to add a drum machine or any type of typical remix stuff later on. An interesting tricks in long distance collaboration is to play to a click track but take it away and send only your recorded instrument to the other person. Even if this person does research the original tempo and sets up his own local click track it will be different and as such result in something surprising. When you play as a musician you always have a "radar within". This built-in radar doesn't only deal with tempi, it's about everything in the music. Emotions, transitions, directions... The trick to succeed in online collaborating is to develop a collaborating method that allows the collaborators to identify that "inner radar sequence" of the partner and being able to relate to it in his own playing. One mistake you can make, when you receive a recording, is to listen "for sound" rather than for your partners specific "inner radar print". When playing together physically this is not such a big danger because you will see the "bored to death" look on your partners face and remember to adjust your playing into a more communicative manner, but in distance collab's you really have to look out for that trap all the time ;-) Greetings from Sweden Per Boysen www.boysen.se (Swedish) www.looproom.com (international) http://tinyurl.com/fauvm (podcast) http://tinyurl.com/2kek7h (CC donationware music releases)