Collaboration/Session Sharing with other Cubase users

3 people I play music with have cubase now which is great and we want to work on some projects together virtually so as not having to get together in one place at the same time to add parts. An age old story I would guess.

I did some searching for the accepted way people are approaching collaboration on cubase sessions. Sounds like some people are using dropbox to share the sessions with other users but not much more detail.

We had thought about about creating sessions with 2 track mixes we would add to but that doesn’t seem very flexible and a real pain as you are always creating a new mix and replacing the current one in your session.

Questions

Any other options? Is there something built in I dont know about?

If you use dropbox do you then copy it to and from your project folder each time there is a new version so that the audio files are relative and work for both users?

What about audio files? Say some one adds a track.

I know there was something called rocket network out there but seems like its just the same as if we each used our dropbox folder as the session folder. Maybe thats not a bad idea? what about conflicting saves though?

I’ve been experimenting with a similar setup.
Dropbox works just fine, even if you’re working in the Dropbox folder itself, without copying and re-syncing manually.
You want to make sure though that you’re not working in the Dropbox from two (or three) sides at the same time…
In that case, copying and re-syncing is the safer approach.
We do it without export or any limitation. Everybody’s on the same Cubase version and the project folder is in the Dropbox.
Dropbox doesn’t support file locks yet, so it might be necessary to implement a procedure to rule out concurrent access to the projects (e.g. like a temporay marker file that signals others that there’s work in progress).

We’ve found that the free Dropbox account becomes too small quickly, so we bought one 50GB subscription. You only need one of those if it’s ok for you to use the same Dropbox account on all the collaborating machines.

And, of course, frequent backups of the projects in the Dropbox folder are mandatory, just in case.

My personal approach has been so far: if I want to work with some peace of mind on a project, I copy it into my music folder and resync with the Dropbox when I’m done.
Using the project notepad as a journal might be a good idea too. Leave it open when you save your work so it will be open for the next person to work on it.
All in all with a little disicpline (and backups!) collaboration is quite possible.

One last thing about the Dropbox: when someone opens a cubase project directly from the Dropbox, the other Dropbox clients that are online will receive messages about deleted files all the time. This is nothing to worry about, it happens just by opening a project. Cubase of course locks the respective files and this is being misinterpreted by Dropbox (so I believe)

just my 2 cents…

Thank God we are getting away from human interaction! This world is so much better without it!

You can use any cloud method you like, be it dropbox, or somoene’s server/ftp space, or you can send using yousendit, or wetransfer, etc.

And yeah - if someone adds a track, that track (audiuo file) will have to uploaded/sent, so that everyone else has it, and can import it into their project.

Doesn’t the latest vers of C6 have some sort of cloud feature?

Cheers.

too bad this doesn’t appear to have been kept current:

http://home.earthlink.net/~fredclrk/dawSYNC/

too bad this doesn’t appear to have been kept current: > http://home.earthlink.net/~fredclrk/dawSYNC/

Oh no! Online collaboration is the devil’s handiwork:

Thank God we are getting away from human interaction! This world is so much better without it!

Kidding aside, there’s got to be something out there that specializes in the needs of DAW users. I’ll keep searching.

  1. Traditional Windows-server-based file sharing…supports sharing and locking, but performs very slowly over typical domestic Internet/WAN connections.

  2. private FTP sites etc. Little further functionality over and above simple read-only sharing, and off-line write access from a single user at a time. …and so many people have not yet appreciated what the asymmetric aspect of what ADSL means, when uploading…often at less than 10% of real-world download speeds. Not too bad if you’re uploading compressed MP3s etc…but a nightmare with typical 24-bit WAV files often being 50-100Mbytes or more. If you’ve ever uploaded HD videos to YouTube you’ll know all about this.

  3. Project-based collaboration sites (I’ve used PanMind.com)…little better than FTP sites, but at least there is more in the way of multiple version control and user annotation and messaging. Definitely easier/friendlier to end-user self-administer than FTP.

  4. A possibly appropriate solution though might be to use sites/repositories based on Microsoft’s SharePoint products. Not the fastest platform around, but has good multiple version control, user access rights control, and facilities for check-in/check-out for those wanting write access. (as opposed to just sharing with multiple concurrent users in read-only / offline mode) Bu there don’t seem to be so many of these facilities for the public, outside of the corporate networks.

I’m still very cynical about the ability of the current Internet networking technologies to do genuine real-time (let alone multi-user) collaboration. Network latency, QOS (quality of service) and low bandwith being just three obvious technical limitations to creative flow…

Does anybody have any personal experience of a real-time live, multi-user collaboration facility? I think this is probably far more hype than practical reality. Make my day please…