Sharing .wav files

[lo beam]

I was wondering if anyone could offer any more solutions to this little problem.
I recently travelled to New Zealand, leaving my bandmates & creative buddies back in the UK, but we're now writing stuff that we'd like to collaborate on long-distance.
So, we're basically looking at ways to swap .wav files of the individual tracks that make up our new songs. That way we can record stuff, send them to each other to add to & so on.
2 solutions that seem to be worthwhile are a) storing the files at a mutually agreed location (ie - our website), or b) emailing them to each other.
Both have their limitations, so does anyone have any other ideas that may prove beneficial?
Thanks.

 

[AlexW]

The website storage idea makes the most sense to me.

 

[minofifa]

are your recordings for creative purposes or quality purposes? what i mean is, if you are just combining tracks to get an idea of new stuff, using mp3 format would probably make sense. They are way easier to transfer over the internet but you do lose some quality.

if you use mp3's, one suggestion i would do is:

1. get a gmail account and give all your bandmates the password
2. download the shell extension for gmail that creates a virtual drive on each bandmembers computer. This drive shows up as "gmail drive" under "my computer" but really it is kind of like an ftp system.
3. create your tracks and simply drag them into the gmail drive. This will upload them to your gmail account. With gmail, you now get 2 gigs of storage which is huge.

if you need a gmail account, let me know, i have a few to give out still.

 

[BentRabbit]

The collabs I've done here in the forums were via web-based storage... I have a friend on the other side of the country that I also collaborate with via snail mail (Zip disks and CD's)...

I totally prefer the web based solution. Make sure your provider offers plenty of space... Those waves can get real hefty real fast...

Good luck!

 

[lo beam]

are your recordings for creative purposes or quality purposes? what i mean is, if you are just combining tracks to get an idea of new stuff, using mp3 format would probably make sense. They are way easier to transfer over the internet but you do lose some quality.

if you use mp3's, one suggestion i would do is:

1. get a gmail account and give all your bandmates the password
2. download the shell extension for gmail that creates a virtual drive on each bandmembers computer. This drive shows up as "gmail drive" under "my computer" but really it is kind of like an ftp system.
3. create your tracks and simply drag them into the gmail drive. This will upload them to your gmail account. With gmail, you now get 2 gigs of storage which is huge.

if you need a gmail account, let me know, i have a few to give out still.

Good idea, thanks.
I do have gmail so I've done as you suggested.
I still wanna use wavs though, so we'll see how much the 2 gigs can handle....or possibly we could record tracks as .wavs, convert & store em as mp3s & convert back to .wav later.
Not sure how much quality loss will go on there, but it's probably worth a shot.

 

[minofifa]

yeah that is what you ahve to do, record the raw wav and then convert.

you shouldn't loose too much quality at all. it probably won't even be noticable. if you are that anal about it, you can even use lossless compression on your files.

 

[thane1200]

...you can even use lossless compression....

How the hell do you do that? Doesn't all compression have some loss?

 

[minofifa]

well i didn't elaborate cause honestly i'm not well informed on the topic . I actually recall blue bear talking about it in a thread i read a while back, maybe i can find it. I also remember apple stating it had a form of lossless compression kicking as well.

 

[MichaelM]

Is zip compression lossey? No... There are lossless compression algorithms for audio, although they don't compress as much as the lossey ones (mp3 etc). If you're collaborating for creative purposes (ie - not releasing it for sale) then I think you'd be fine with high bitrate mp3s. You could always store the wav files locally and them bring them together to finish the project.. Thats probably what I would do.

 

[gordone]

Look up Monkey's Audio on Google. Lossless compression of wav files, it cuts the file size (on average) in half. Think about it - Wav files are just data, just like a Word document. WinZip can compress word documents right? It's lossless because you can retrieve the complete word document when you unzip (not your fly!) Same thing with Wav Files, except WinZip (and other "generic" compression programs like gzip) don't work as well on audio data. Monkey's Audio was tailored specifically for wav data. Mathematically, it's pretty neat too. It's all explained on the website.

How the hell do you do that? Doesn't all compression have some loss?

 

[lo beam]

Thanks for that...it IS great innit?

And thanks to everyone fer chiming in & offering thoughts.

 

[elevate]

FLAC, OptimFROG, Shorten, and Wavpack are a few more lossless codecs. You could probably get by with converting to Musepack or Ogg Vorbis at the max bit rates.