I am the drummer of my band.
I prepare drum track with Audacity. (Work very well)
i want to share the projet with the other musicien of my band.
Everyone receive the project. Add their track and send to the next member.
i want to share a open, no finish projet to my friend without convert in mp3 or other. Is it possible ?
i seem to me that if i export in MP3, it’s close the project. Is existing a possibility to simply rebuilt a multi track projet with mp3 exportation ?
Thank you.
From french Canadian.
MP3 is lossy so it’s best if you share WAV or FLAC files. FLAC is about half the size as the uncompressed WAV but both formats are larger than MP3s
When you re-open an MP3 for editing it gets decompressed. If you later re-export as MP3 you are going through another generation of lossy compression and “damage” does accumulate. (AAC is similar to MP3 and also lossy but much more immune to accumulated damage.)
Sharing an [u]Audacity Project[/u] is a little trickier than sharing regular audio files. Your project files will be larger than “regular” WAV files.
I think you should be the Central Clearing House for sound files, not have the other performers pushing sound files back and forth to each other.
Keep the perfect quality WAV version of your drum or rhythm/backing track for final mixing and production later. Make a small efficient MP3 and post that to a Drop-Box or other file service. Other performers download your backing track and play to it, but don’t do anything else. That eliminates the multiple MP3 distortion problem. They post a WAV version of their part of the song to you and you save that for later. You make standard start-time MP3s for the others to play against.
As the song progresses, more and more MP3 parts will pile up on Drop-Box. Each musician can play as many different other instruments as they want, or only one or two. And save them for later. It’s up to them, and those MP3s never see the inside of a final mix. That’s what the WAV files they send you are for.
I think I would send a metronome track out first rather than drum. If you wander a little bit, then everybody else will have to wander in the same place. If you post one of the metronome tracks, everybody is working from exactly the same beat. Or just post the drum track with a metronome lead-in. Up to you. The music on Drop-Box is all tight, efficient, but throw-away trash and temporary guide tracks. None of that will end up in the final show.
~~
You can make this fancier (and more work for you) by making up a temporary mix MP3 from the perfect WAV files and post that. That’s insanely handy because each performer can play that mix on a Personal Music Player while recording their segment on the computer. It will seem like playing along with a song on the radio and nobody has to get good at overdubbing. Did you see my comedy bit on how to adjust overdubbing latency? It’s a knee-slapper.
If you don’t do it that way then everybody has to suddenly get good at overdubbing, computer setup, editing, and music mixdown. Scan over the forum at all the fun things that can go wrong.
As DVDdoug above, you can’t make good copies of MP3. MP3 gets its efficient, small files by shuffling musical harmonics and overtones—and leaving some of them out. You can only make an MP3 from an MP3 about three times before the music turns to mush.
Koz
Getting WAV files to you could be a challenge. A three-minute ordinary WAV file comes in about 32MB. My email poops out at 25MB. This may be a good place for one of the “lossless” file types such as FLAC.
Koz
If all the people that are sharing the project are reasonably good with computers, then a really good (though rather “technical”) way to share projects is via GitHub.