Different andio programs have their own format for project files but thay all can handle wav files but the problem with email is the file size. This is where us old fogies who are not internet geeks have to learn from the kids. You don't simply send these files to someone over the internet by pushing a button. An uncompressed wave file of just one 4 minute guitar track can be 30mb, much too large for an email attachment. What I use is FLAC a lossless compression utility, it will shrink that size file down to maybe 30% which is still too big for an email attachment then the other party uses FLAC to uncompress it and it's the exact same wav file with no artifacts. You have to do this for each track so if it's only a trio band not too bad but if it 15 tracks, that can get combersome but you can still do it. Just Google FLAC.

Once you've shrunk the individual tracks, the best way is to use any one of many different websites that can forward several of these files at once like yousendit, M/S Skydrive and others. I think I used Skydrive the last time, it's a service where you can park a certain number of files up to a max limit on that site and the other party can log in and download them. You have to sign up and register with these but they're free. I haven't done an online collabaration for over a year and things change fast in cyberspace so there's probably some new sites out there I don't know about.

Lastly yes, put a countin at the very beginning of the song on each track even if a track doesn't start until the second verse. Putting a countin at the beginning makes it a no brainer for the other party to import them and have them all line up.

Almost forgot, don't have each track be too hot like -1 or or -2db. A bunch of individual tracks that hot won't mix together without some severe limiting. Leave them fairly low like -3 or -4 so when the other party combines them they'll mix. That way you're giving him some headroom to work. Otherwise he has to do a gain change on all or most of them in order to mix them properly. A lot of audio programs have default settings that can automatically normalize those tracks and that could be good enough but someone who knows what they're doing won't want that, they want to handle it manually.

Bob

Last edited by jazzmammal; 12/01/11 12:28 PM.
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