Best file sharing/syncing for long distance music recordings

3 years ago by tomatobeard to c/selfhosted

Hi all! My friends and I are hoping to continue writing and recording music though we live very far apart now. We all use MacBooks for recording tracks, and I was curious if anyone has a good way to share/sync our recordings with each other.

Years ago I used Resilio Sync without much fuss, though I'd lean more towards Syncthing now. I have a always-on and internet-connected home Linux server. Thanks for any suggestions!

Edit: I forgot to mention my buddies are not techy types, so ease-of-use on their end is an important feature.

Gutless2615 13 points 3 years ago

Easy. Syncthing

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TheHolm 5 points 3 years ago

If your music come in form of files, use syncthing. Fast simple, cross platform.

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Tiritibambix 5 points 3 years ago

Absolutely not selfhosted nor foss nor anything close to this sub's content but if money is not a problem, Protools has a collaborative feature that is pretty neat. You can all work on the same session at the same time and send tracks back and forth.

This or syncthing as everyone mentioned.

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mook71 5 points 3 years ago

I've used both syncthing and recently resilio. My Syno NAS has their own app Synology drive. All three have worked great for me.

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FermatsLastAccount 4 points 3 years ago

Do you want the files to be automatically shared? Like there's a folder on both your computers that's synced

If so, syncthing is the way to go.

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flunky 4 points 3 years ago

Nextcloud maybe? Not specifically geared toward collaborative music recording, but maybe you could come up with a good workflow.

It's an interesting use case. I'd be curious to see what you (and/or others) come up with.

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tomatobeard 3 points 3 years ago

Thanks for the suggestion! It's the workflow part I'm worried about. 😄 I was kinda thinking a git would be perfect: different branches are different versions or styles of the song, versioning is taken care of, and probably other benefits I can't even dream of. But my friends won't be staging and committing. I also haven't done this in a while, so it'll be cool to see what others may know about.

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atzanteol 2 points 3 years ago

There's a git plugin called "annex" which is geared towards working with binary files. I use it for photography as a way to "checkout" and remove photos locally while keeping them all in git on a server.

It's a little complicated to use though. But I believe it could do branching/versioning.

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LiquidMastering 3 points 3 years ago

Ooh. Finally something I know a good deal about.

I’m a mastering engineer and sync files with folks all over the world.

I have been using this really great app for the past few years: SAMPLY

https://samply.app/ Let’s all collaborators upload files and comments by timestamp are excellent. Works on a potato.

Also, for general big file swaps, The 2 most easily obtained by the majority of people in my experience are Dropbox and Google drive.

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ShellMonkey 3 points 3 years ago

Syncthing was mentioned, but I would think something that doesn't auto sync to everyone would be better. Nextcloud or really any kind of central storage would let people who need a given part selectivley pull what they want and give a bit of flexibility for each to store things in a folder structure they like.

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JoeHill 2 points 3 years ago

The Postal Service (or technically FedEX or UPS). Worked for The Postal Service.

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tomatobeard 1 point 3 years ago

😄 That would've been so fun when I was younger. Getting new tapes in the mail!! Now it seems awful, haha.

They're touring for their album's anniversary this year. I'm going to see them in Denver 🙌

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ciko22i3 2 points 3 years ago

syncthing

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tomatobeard 1 point 3 years ago

Thanks for everyone's suggestions! This morning I came across this music-centered awesome list and thought I'd share it.

https://github.com/ad-si/awesome-music-production

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