Sorry if this has been asked before - couldn’t find this situation elsewhere on the forums.
I’ve got Cubase Pro 8 (Mac) and my bandmate has Cubase Artist 8 (PC). We do most of the recording and editing using my Mac but he sometimes takes songs back with him to work on vocals or drums. He doesn’t have all of the plugins I have (obviously) but we are able to work around that. Most of our recording is audio based other than the Midi drums.
Sometimes we save the song to a memory stick, or if we’re not going to see each other for a couple of weeks we might zip up the songs and share using Dropbox.
Usually this works OK - but sometimes he tries to open the song and a bit of audio is missing. But not the whole channel, one of the blocks of audio just won’t be there. If I save the song and share it with him again, the same bit of audio will be missing each time.
I thought maybe the audio file could have been in a random directory so I checked my pool and can see all of the audio is in the same directory on my Mac, and when I save the song to share with him I use the File > Backup Project… dialogue which I believe is the best way of making sure the whole song and all of its elements are saved together in one place.
If I open the song from the version I’m sending him it contains everything it should.
When he opens the song he doesn’t see any “file missing” type of errors; the block where the audio should be in that channel is just missing.
Should I be able to do this? Am I doing something wrong? Does anyone know a better/more reliable way of sharing songs while working on them?
I am sharing from pc to pc to/from CB 9.5 Pro but we do it by coping the actual project folder contents (using file explorer) to a USB key and, like you, copy/zip to Dropbox. We never have the issue you described (portions of audio missing) or any issues at all using the copied (not zipped) USB key. But, using Dropbox we periodically have issues with the 2nd computer saying the project is corrupt. This is always fixed by doing a 2nd (or 3rd) copy/zip to Dropbox.
So for me, the issue is with zipping the project stuff or during the Dropbox up/download.
Thanks Prock - I would have assumed it was to do with the upload/download via Dropbox but it’s weird that doing it a second time results in the exact same situation with the same bit of audio missing.
Sometimes when he sends stuff back to me the file path doesn’t get updated so my computer shows a file missing error that it’s looking on his C: drive for something, but as we’ve usually recorded stuff here I just locate the local version of the audio.
I liked using the backup project dialogue because I believe it will save everything it needs to restore the project in a different location, and (especially when working with more than one person) we can end up with several versions of the same song. It’s reassuring to be able to listen to the song, so both visually and audibly check everything is there that you think ought to be, then back up from Cubase knowing you’re creating a backup of the right version.
Interesting that you said
This is always fixed by doing a 2nd (or 3rd) copy/zip to Dropbox.
as I think that if it didn’t work when sharing via Dropbox we’d just work on it the next time we meet. I don’t think we’ve kept uploading more than a couple of times before trying a different approach. Maybe we’ll make more attempts before giving up…
So for me, the issue is with zipping the project stuff or during the Dropbox up/download.
When we first started sharing song files this way we didn’t zip them up, but definitely saw some corruption then. So we started zipping them up (and as our songs get bigger, this is necessary just to try to reduce time waiting for them to upload!)
I suppose the trouble is we’ve got a few variables - I’m on Mac, he’s on PC, slightly different versions of Cubase, we’re zipping up, then sharing via Dropbox - there are a lot of areas which could introduce errors!
