"Collaborations in this day & age
Posted by deadly habit on October 8, 2010
In this day and age of modern computing and networking the human social element sometimes seems to take the backseat to technological interactions (take the ironic term social networking for starters). Back in the day before high speed internet a collaboration with someone a city away meant a day trip and staying on your buds couch while you worked into the wee hours of the night. Collaborating with someone a state away could be done in the same way, or you could mail some sort of data medium like a cd back and forth or tie up your phone line all day trying to transfer large audio files back and forth via irc or icq. International collaborations… I think you get the picture.
Cut back to modern times, bandwidth is abundant, data storage is getting cheaper by the gigabyte, and that old collaboration experience of being able to quickly run ideas back and forth as if you were in the same room is now available in a virtual capacity. Now there are companies such as Ohm Force who are working on what I’m talking about as an all inclusive DAW application called Ohm Studio, which is definitely something to keep your eyes on. I’d even go so far as to say sign up for the beta test and give it a try.
Another product in the same vein is Collab which comes included with FL Studio. Personally I have no real experience with it and haven’t used FL Studio in quite a few years, so I can’t really comment on it.
Back to the topic at hand collaborating be it with someone from your city or someone halfway around the world via the internet. An ideal collaboration would be both users would be using the same DAW, the same plugins, and have the same base audio samples in their pools. Well we all know this is far from true and unless you want to be extremely limited with who you collaborate with, you’re going to have to venture out of your comfort zone and start working in audio clips back and forth to compensate for difference in DAWs, plugins, etc. Commonly this would be done via a omnidirectional protocol where as one user would upload a file via a method of choice, be it an instant messanger program or a host online. Here’s where things start getting cool, the application and service offered by Dropbox is truly a godsend for collaborating producers. Instead of an omnidirectional flow of data and having to manually send files you now have an application and online based mirror of whatever you have in your dropbox folder that automatically syncs and updates as the files change in it. That in itself is cool enough, but you can also choose to share a folder with other friends and that is where the magic happens. By enabling the option you now have a constantly updating pool that both producers can continuously update and modify the contents of as the project progresses without having to deal with the hassles of waiting for files to upload or download and wasting time doing that.
That solves one issue and makes it almost closer to a human experience, the next is to get rid of those archaic instant messenger programs that waste time typing back and forth when you could be tweaking knobs, playing keys and nodding your head to that sick bassline. Anyone who has done any extensive online PC gaming will probably know of the suggestions I’m about to make, but for those of you unaware it’s time to get VOIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) involved. The options I’d suggest here would be Ventrilo or Teamspeak. Ventrilo I know works with ASIO quite easily so it’s ideal for this. Teamspeak I’d have to install again and explore, so I’ll leave that up to you readers to decide.
Once you have a common server to connect to and both users have a microphone (headset or standard) get your clients connected and now you can speak back and forth like a phone, but with more options that I’ll leave up to you to explore.
So in summation we now have a folder that is constantly synced and updated by both users like a standard LAN network shared drive would be, and a direct verbal line of communication between both parties (the only issue that can get in the way here is timezones, but hey producers don’t tend to keep normal hours anyways). I’m sure with some creative routing and/or patching you could even transmit, say a synth line you’re messing with via the VOIP software instead of rendering an audio file to put in the shared folder.
Technology really can bring people and musicians together."
Wow , this is like a FM/CM editor's intro , Just a joke bruv
, will be following that for sure
Not saying there's not any here but you have to skim through the shit to find the nuggets so to speak. 
