Could you recommend a platform that allows me to share musical ideas with my friends, so we can eventually form songs/compositions? I’m not interested in social media‑type software (it seems like so‑called ‘free’ apps like BandLab are thinly disguised social media apps designed to harvest your data!) or collaborating with strangers around the world, just a way of sharing WAV or equivalent files between two people in different locations and then editing and mixing remotely. Any thoughts gratefully received.
James Dexter
Editor‑In‑Chief Sam Inglis replies: For this purpose, the best option is probably one of the general‑purpose cloud storage platforms such as Dropbox, iCloud, Microsoft OneDrive, or Google Drive. This recent SOS article describes one approach that uses OneDrive, but as far as I know, any of them should be usable as long as you have enough storage and a good Internet connection: www.soundonsound.com/techniques/remote-music-production
Modern DAW software typically loads all the audio data in a project into the computer’s RAM, so in theory it may be possible to actually open a project from a remote/cloud drive directly into your DAW, but it’s perhaps safer and easier to work on projects locally and then just copy the files into a shared folder when you need to transfer them.
If you’re a Pro Tools user, that DAW has a Cloud Collaboration feature built in which permits projects to be stored in the cloud and worked on simultaneously by multiple users.
[For Studio One users, PreSonus recently launched their PreSonus Sphere service which includes cloud storage and collaboration tools - Ed.]