sharing across garageband x 4 macs

[skidder652003]

so as the lockdown continues and the gigging has been mothballed for probably the end of the year

I've managed to get everyone in the band on garageband, loaned out old macs to the not so tech savvy guitarist etc..

The idea is that the guitarist has at least 4 or 5 ideas to put down, send em to me (all click tracked), I put bass parts down, then to the drummer, then finally the singer, you get the idea

Has anyone tried anything like this? I know you can share files but what's the quickest and most convenient way to share this stuff? 

There's email, icloud, messaging, whatsapp...anyone else doing this and their advice would be appreciated.

[BigRedX]

I'm doing something like this at the moment. We're sharing files via dropbox as the project file has grown quite large. For us it's more working on proper recordings of already written songs, but depending on how long the lockdown situation last we might start writing new material too.

The way our tracks work is the synth player has programmed up the drums and put down his parts along with a guide vocal. It's then passed around the rest of the band for us to add our parts one at a time. It will end up go back to the synth player for him to do the final mix that the rest of us will comment on.

[skidder652003]

2 hours ago, BigRedX said:

I'm doing something like this at the moment. We're sharing files via dropbox as the project file has grown quite large. For us it's more working on proper recordings of already written songs, but depending on how long the lockdown situation last we might start writing new material too.

The way our tracks work is the synth player has programmed up the drums and put down his parts along with a guide vocal. It's then passed around the rest of the band for us to add our parts one at a time. It will end up go back to the synth player for him to do the final mix that the rest of us will comment on.

Thanks for that. So you're using dropbox for large wav files I guess? I'll probably just use medium quality mp3 files and email everyone who can then download the files and drag them onto a new track on GB before adding their parts. Up until Feb our guitarist didn't even have an email, smartphone, FB account or any social media profile (all of which I sorted as "leader" of this band) so it's going to be quite a learning curve for him on GB but he's full of ideas so it'll be great to get him up and running if possible. Thanks for your input .

PS it was thanks to you that I manged to get an older version of GB on both my older Imacs.

Edited May 1, 2020 by skidder652003

[BigRedX]

I don't normally use Garageband, but this project has co-incided with upgrading my Mac and it's OS from a MacPro 3,1 running El Capitan to a MacPro 5,1 running High Sierra and as a result my copy of Logic 9 no longer works. However the guitarist also uses Garageband so we're both doing our parts in that.

From what I can see, the .band file is the whole project including all the audio and MIDI, so you only have to move a single file about and not worry about audio parts being left behind. On the other hand the file for the song I am currently working on is almost 400MB for a 4 minute track and that's with all the drums bounced down to a single stereo audio file.