How do I trade files w/my brother?
I’m a drummer and my brother plays guitar…he lives 300 miles away and we want to trade files back and forth. What’s the best way?
Well, you could go the Bit Torrent route and use it as it was initially intended. Bit Torrent has gotten a bad reputation as folks use it to pirate a lot of stuff, but alas, it can be used for the powers of good as well. Essentially, you use it to distrbute files to people. You share your file, send a “torrent” file to the person you want to be able to get the file (aka, e-mail the file to your brother) which has the information for his computer to find yours, and he loads that file and downloads away. The other option is getting hosted FTP or web space somewhere. Bit Torrent is free. BitTorrent
Bit torrent won’t help much for sending files from one person to another. Bit torrent’s idea is that everyone who has the file feeds it to everyone who wants it, in a one to one situation that isn’t going to help.
How to transfer depends on your internet connections. If you have hi-speed and you’r going to send large WAV files then you need an email service such as gmail that can handle large file, or a web storage location you can upload to.
One thing I did was open a yahoo account to share with some friends, then we used yahoo briefcase to upload and trade files. Either way you have to upload and download them.
You can always send a CD, or other kind of memory card.
There are probably other ideas I’m missing but bit torrent will be a pain to use if your sending things one to one
Why won’t BitTorrent work? So long as you send the .torrent file over to the recipient, it should go fine. By only letting his brother have the Torrent and no one else, it should remain fairly secure. He won’t get the distribution of bandwidth that BitTorrent was built for, but one to one should work just as well as any other torrent setup.
It will work it just won’t be any more effecient than emailing it. If you bit torrent one to one, then the file stays on your PC until your friend accesses it, then you have to upload as he downloads. It should work fine but it’s a fair amount of setup considering you can just email the file and it will arrive just as fast.
Many emails can’t handle large attachments that’s why I suggested gmail but if they have a webspace or yahoo account you can use that also. there are probably other ways.
Tony
How does bittorrent deal with the fact that your IP address changes now and then?
Email is really the simplest method, if it works.
Regardless, you’ll want to compress the files to transfer them. I highly recommend
dBPowerAmp Music Converter (dMC)
for this purpose. It allows you to convert between a wide number of audio formats by right-clicking on them, even from within “file browser” windows in other programs.
Download & install it, and also download and install one or more of the following codecs from the “Codec Central” part of their website:
WMA - best general purpose codec for tracks in terms of quality and low hassle
APE - “lossless” compression, meaning perfect fidelity – no change to data at all – but much larger files than WMA, MP3, or Ogg Vorbis.
OGG - similar in capability to WMA, but without variable bit rate (IIRC).
I generally avoid MP3 for this purpose because it adds about 25 msec of silence to the beginning of the track, which causes sync problems. Note that you may have sync issues anyway, so it’s always best to include the “count in click” in tracks you post – whether mixes for recording other tracks to, or the other tracks. Make the click nice and loud so you can clearly see it in your DAW.
You and your brother may also want to consider letting other folks join in the fun, and get 100MB of free web space each for this purpose, at ArtistCollaboration.com. To see how things generally work over there, see this article.
There is of course the “Track/Net Transfer” facility built into n-track. This assumes that both PCs have valid WAN IP addresses (which you will have if you are using a USB modem, analogue modem, etc) and that your firewalls are configured to allow this (by default, open port 1010 - the sender needs this open outgoing and the receiver needs it open incoming - though you will only want to do this for the duration of the transfer to keep secure). This method also includes built in compression for those who require it.
You would have to put in your brother’s IP address - this can be found by running “ipconfig” from a cmd prompt or using the menu option under Track/Net Transfer.
Get an account over at Collaboration Central and swap files that way.
http://artistcollaboration.com/
There are some useful free internet services for large file transfer. I have used SendThisFile and YouSendIt with success.
Cheers
Steve T.
The reason I did not suggest e-mail is that so many ISPs have size retrictions of 2MB for SMTP traffic. Even an MP3 will blow past that in a hurry.
If you don’t want to screw with that, then there is always FTP as many others and myself have suggested. I use CC myself.
gmail has no realistic file size limit (2gb I guess would be max) and does not use SMTP. That collaboration site looks cool also.
Maybe this is overkill … but you can purchase webhosting for like $5 a month these days. Add to that an annual charge of $5 for domain name registration, and you are good to go.
For my $5 a month, i get a ton of web-based features (databases, scripting), ftp accounts, 6.5gb transfer per month, 500mb storage, unlimited email accounts, subdomains, and the satisfaction of having my own little place on the internet.
The best part … if I change ISP’s … I don’t have to change me email address or my website.
It’s the best $5 a month I ever spent.
I use ICD Soft, but there are many other places to choose from.
Same here CMW I also have my own webhosting for around $6 per month with 500mb of space and 5 email accounts for another $20 per year.
I have primarily used it for transfering files to collaborators at this point.
I do however think hotmail and gmail and yahoo etc. are just a reliable a way to “keep” your email forever. It’s sad that so many non knowledgeable internet users (families etc.) always sign up with the ISP email not realizing what this will cost them down the road.
Thanks everyone! I’m hoping the send this file site does the trick!
I’m new to this N-Track thing…but it really looks fun…thanks for the help! Todd