I am surprised how many 'issues' come to mind almost immediately after launching a collaboration project like this, almost all of them organizational, some technical, and some artistic. I think it's part of the point of this project to discuss this kind of stuff here so we can learn the pluses and pitfalls of collaborating this way with Mixcraft.
1) the mix you posted. Wow, super cleanup job for a couple tracks that I
know I'm going to be replacing anyway. Almost hate to see your efforts wasted there, Tom, but it also makes me want to go back and give you some 'real vocals' to work with. I can see I'm going to have to keep you busy!
2) did you not save your work? I know you were just 'getting a feel' but you didn't save any of the changes to the .mx7 file. Did you save a separate .mx7 to your local PC? My original thought was that we'd all work on the same file incrementally.
3) DANGER DANGER WILL ROBINSON! We're going to have to figure out a way to 'hand off' control of the .mx7 file so that two people aren't working on it at the same time!!! This is going to be a biiig problem! For example, I was thinking of going in to record a bunch of vocal takes to give you something to work with, but that would take me hours, during which time you or Outeh or Markus could be working on something else. The last person to save changes wins, wiping out the other work!!!
4) Artistic control and hurt feelings. As in, I'm going to have to play executive producer and nix a lot of stuff. For example, there is no way in Hades there is going to be a string solo where you played one. OK, there might be (no, there won't lol). I don't mind saying that now because I know you were just getting a feel (nothing wrong with the performance, either). But I think you get my point. At many points during a project like this a lot of efforts are going to be negated. Just something I hadn't really thought about, and it's worth talking about up front.
5) Mixcraft projects are going to get huge and messy. Due to the nondestructive editing feature Mixcraft keeps lots of .wav files around which are of no use. In my opinion Mixcraft needs a 'cleanup' button so that a user can choose to 'get rid of all unwanted takes'. For example, right now I've got two tracks, vocal and guitar, one lane each. But the project folder retains 12 .wav files. I can easily see myself doing 10 takes of the vocal alone, probably 5 good ones, comped down to one. It's going to be interesting to see how the project folder balloons in size.
6) Rough mixes and naming conventions: rough mixes to .wav seems like overkill, definitely bandwidth wise, and will make them harder to post. Definitely should save as .mp3's , in my opinion.
For example, in order to post your effort on the project SoundCloud page, I have to open the .wav file you saved and convert it to .mp3 first. I will, because I want to let people hear it, but it's a pain.
https://soundcloud.com/if-i-didntcare/0 ... didnt-care
Also, we could end up with forty "Tom's Cut"s or "Pauls Mix" files. I suggest using the format:
01242015T If I Didn't Care.mp3
Which is simply the date as a prefix, followed by an initial. Also going to need a way to differentiate between multiple mixes if done on the same day. Hmmmmmmm. Maybe
01242015T (101).mp3
01242015P (102).mp3
(T for Tom, P for Paul, etc.) and so forth would work? No point in typing in the song title as we know what we're working on. I know this sounds like a PITA but I think we've got to decide on something if 4 or more people will be doing rough mixes.
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As you can see, there is a LOT to think about here. I hope discussing these things doesn't slow things down too much, but I think it's useful for the long term, and the whole point of doing this is to learn how collaboration can work. For certain we'll have to figure out a way to avoid multiple people having the same file open at the same time, and soon. Other people must have run into this problem with Dropbox before, I will go do some research.
Thoughts anyone on any of this?