Hi all! My friends and I are hoping to continue writing and recording music though we live very far apart now. We all use MacBooks for recording tracks, and I was curious if anyone has a good way to share/sync our recordings with each other.
Years ago I used Resilio Sync without much fuss, though I’d lean more towards Syncthing now. I have a always-on and internet-connected home Linux server. Thanks for any suggestions!
Edit: I forgot to mention my buddies are not techy types, so ease-of-use on their end is an important feature.
Easy. Syncthing
Absolutely not selfhosted nor foss nor anything close to this sub’s content but if money is not a problem, Protools has a collaborative feature that is pretty neat. You can all work on the same session at the same time and send tracks back and forth.
This or syncthing as everyone mentioned.
If your music come in form of files, use syncthing. Fast simple, cross platform.
I’ve used both syncthing and recently resilio. My Syno NAS has their own app Synology drive. All three have worked great for me.
Nextcloud maybe? Not specifically geared toward collaborative music recording, but maybe you could come up with a good workflow.
It’s an interesting use case. I’d be curious to see what you (and/or others) come up with.
Thanks for the suggestion! It’s the workflow part I’m worried about. 😄 I was kinda thinking a git would be perfect: different branches are different versions or styles of the song, versioning is taken care of, and probably other benefits I can’t even dream of. But my friends won’t be staging and committing. I also haven’t done this in a while, so it’ll be cool to see what others may know about.
There’s a git plugin called “annex” which is geared towards working with binary files. I use it for photography as a way to “checkout” and remove photos locally while keeping them all in git on a server.
It’s a little complicated to use though. But I believe it could do branching/versioning.
Do you want the files to be automatically shared? Like there’s a folder on both your computers that’s synced
If so, syncthing is the way to go.
Syncthing was mentioned, but I would think something that doesn’t auto sync to everyone would be better. Nextcloud or really any kind of central storage would let people who need a given part selectivley pull what they want and give a bit of flexibility for each to store things in a folder structure they like.
The Postal Service (or technically FedEX or UPS). Worked for The Postal Service.
😄 That would’ve been so fun when I was younger. Getting new tapes in the mail!! Now it seems awful, haha.
They’re touring for their album’s anniversary this year. I’m going to see them in Denver 🙌
syncthing
Ooh. Finally something I know a good deal about.
I’m a mastering engineer and sync files with folks all over the world.
I have been using this really great app for the past few years: SAMPLY
https://samply.app/ Let’s all collaborators upload files and comments by timestamp are excellent. Works on a potato.
Also, for general big file swaps, The 2 most easily obtained by the majority of people in my experience are Dropbox and Google drive.
Thanks for everyone’s suggestions! This morning I came across this music-centered awesome list and thought I’d share it.
