Revisiting File Transfer

[Adam]

Hi,

[This one can probably be answered by savvy users and doesn't need Pwnified's attention]

I've been Using MTDAW for quite awhile now and it is fantastic! I'll make mp3s of 30 songs beds without lyrics, then take them out walking to add lyrics on my iTouch. What a wonderful way to make music! Anyway, it's been awhile since I've checked in on the best way to transfer tracks back to my desktop for mixdown, so I'm writing to ask if I'm still doing it in the most effective way I can. I currently use the Wifi web portal to transfer once track at a time, then I drag & drop each track into my desktop DAW. This is time consuming but reliable. Is there any better way to do this yet? If so, please tell me about it or send me to a post that does.

Thanks in advance, and thanks to Pwnified for making and maintaining this wonderful app. I really appreciate the Reverb, BTW. I know it wasn't a small task to implement.

--Adam

[Adam]

Hi Pwnified,

Okay, 64 views from users but nobody reports a better method to move tracks than by using the wifi portal. Pwnified, do Soundcloud and other methods involve the same number of steps or more as the wifi portal? The holy grail would be to be able to click one button to transfer all files within a song at the same time from the device to the computer.

Also, somewherealong the way I lost access to my extra 16 tracks on top of the original 8. I think I was one of those who bought it a long time ago and was given the extra 16 tracks as part of an upgrade. In any case, I've since moved through two iTouch devices, and I've replaced the internal hard drive on my desktop. Do I need to buy the extra 8 tracks again? I rarely go over 8 tracks because of the cumbersome nature of wifi transfer. I tried to restore purchases on MTDAW. I provided my AppleID password when asked, and it told me that there were no purchases to restore.

Thank you thank you thank you for including the portrait orientation lock/unlock feature. This is something I've wished for many times but don't think I ever asked for. A great idea!

One last question about levels. With respect to channel volume, input volume, and output volume, are these defaulted to the best possible gain? I find that (using my 3rd gen iTouch with the provided white earbuds with mic and transport) I need to drop the input volume by around 2.3 to 2.5db to get a good balance. I seem to be able to increase the output volume from -12db upward without too much harm to sound quality. Increasing the channel faders above 0db seems to be harsh. Any tips on maximizing gain structure in MTDAW?

Feel free to send me to previous posts on any of these questions if they have already been answered.

Thanks as always. Just drafted 20 more songs this week...

--Adam

[Thatbastarddon]

Re: wifi transfer:
In your computers browser, on your project's page, scroll down the page... Toward the bottom, below the individual tracks, and bins... You should find an option to choose your entire project "download project". All of your tracks should be in the resulting zip file after downloading.

[Adam]

Wow, I didn't know about the zip file option. That should help. I was assuming I had to mix down to a stereo track. Thanks for pointing this out!

[CougarFool]

Hi Adam,
I only use the Souncloud option and it is a simple 'one tap' sort of process. I haven't had to load my projects onto my PC yet.

[Adam]

Thanks for replies, folks. I'm making progress but it's not solved yet. I just tried the zip download and I indeed I get all of the bins associated with the song, but this doesn't really help. The way I use MTDAW is to record vocals on tracks 2 & 3 over an imported music track on track 1. I comp these vocals, bouncing back and forth, resulting in many short audio bins. This is integral to my writing process so I can't just have one continuious bin for each track. On a 3 track song--such as I've described--I can easily have 25 active bins. Using the Project Pownload feature does not preserve the timing information in tracks. If the tracks were also downloaded and preserved in the Project Download, that would be fantastic, but I listened to the individual bins and it does not look like Track info is captured in separate files. So, is there any way other than the wifi portal to download all tracks at once without having to download tracks one-by-one? Pwnified, it seems like a button on the web portal next to the "Tracks" section offering a zip file of "All Tracks" would do it. Another way would be to add Track files to the existing Project download zip, but they'd have to be named Track 1, Track 2 etc so they could easily be dragged into desktop DAWs. Is this feature already set up and I'm not aware of it?

Thanks,

--Adam

[pwnified]

It's actually a tricky problem because of the potential amount of filespace needed. If a song has sparsly laid out regions, then when rendering tracks they are going to take much more filespace than even the whole song project itself, because the track rendering fills in all the empty space between regions. What you suggest would work if everyone kept their songs to 5 or 10 minutes, but MultiTrack has a 75 minute limit so I need to think about the worst case scenario.

With the Wi-Fi download, the track rendering is basically requested one at a time, they can be sent over the network and then deleted immediately. Unfortunately nothing like this exists in iTunes file sharing.

The plan was to be able to drag the song project folders out of the MultiTrack Documents folder on iTunes, and then use a separate utility to convert the project to another daw format, or even render the tracks from the utility. So far, the folders are working as you discovered, but are not very useful because the raw bins by themselves don't contain the region information. I'll have time to look closely at this in a few weeks time and build a utility.

[Adam]

Thanks Pwnified,

As always, I couldn't ask for a better answer. Would you please respond to these other two questions? I'll be away from email for awhile, but let me thank you in advance for the info!

1) Also, somewherealong the way I lost access to my extra 16 tracks on top of the original 8. I think I was one of those who bought it a long time ago and was given the extra 16 tracks as part of an upgrade. In any case, I've since moved through two iTouch devices, and I've replaced the internal hard drive on my desktop. Do I need to buy the extra 8 tracks again? I rarely go over 8 tracks because of the cumbersome nature of wifi transfer. I tried to restore purchases on MTDAW. I provided my AppleID password when asked, and it told me that there were no purchases to restore.

2) One last question about levels. With respect to channel volume, input volume, and output volume, are these defaulted to the best possible gain? I find that (using my 3rd gen iTouch with the provided white earbuds with mic and transport) I need to drop the input volume by around 2.3 to 2.5db to get a good balance. I seem to be able to increase the output volume from -12db upward without too much harm to sound quality. Increasing the channel faders above 0db seems to be harsh. Any tips on maximizing gain structure in MTDAW?

--Adam

[pwnified]

Well, the tracks can actually be bouncing into the red without clipping the sound at all, because they have more headroom than is really displayed on the track meters. As long as the master OUT meter doesn't go into the red, you'll be ok. So the OUT is defaulted to a lower level (-12 dB) for new song projects. If you record more quietly it might be necessary to turn it up to get a level closer to 0 dB (in the red).

With the "Measurement Mode" (in Settings -> MultiTrack) set to OFF (the default), the IN input fader is a software attenuator, and the optimal recording level is at Zero dB, so I recommend leaving it at zero. With the Measurement Mode set to ON, the IN input fader becomes a real hardware control and can actually stop a loud sound source from clipping the mic, by using a value less than zero.

About the 16 track upgrade, contact me by email and we'll get you sorted.