How to collaborate on audio remotely

If you work with audio often, you may find yourself working alongside other creatives to collaborate on audio remotely. If you collaborate on podcast episodes, for example, sharing feedback may become disorganized through sending emails and trying to accurately record time stamps. Notetracks is a platform built to easily collaborate remotely on audio projects and gather input precisely time-stamped on the track (think of SoundCloud meeting Google Docs), making it a powerful audio software. With a wide variety of audio features, Notetracks is a powerful remote/cloud audio collaboration tool for producers, editors, and artists to take notes on their drafts, demos, and projects before, during, and after production.

To begin, open Notetracks, click the ‘New Project’ button, select audio as your project type, and give it a title.

If you haven’t already, add the audio project you’d like to make comments on into Notetracks by clicking either of the two ‘Add Track’ buttons on the left-hand side of the screen.

You can also add tracks by dragging and dropping, or by importing directly from Dropbox or Google Drive.

In order to collaborate remotely on audio, you’ll need to share your project first. To do so, click on the ‘Share Project’ button in the top right corner of Notetracks. You’ll be greeted by a screen with various sharing options, including sharing via communication platforms, email, username, and/or a public link. You can set the permissions of your remote audio collaborators to ‘Can Edit’, ‘Can Comment’, and ‘Can View’.

You also have the ability to share your audio track at a specific time-stamp by clicking the checkbox in the bottom right corner. If you’d like more information about sharing your audio projects with collaborators, check out our How to Share Audio help blog.

In Notetracks, you can make comments or notes directly on your audio file, allowing them to show up side-by-side visually in the workspace. Leaving comments or notes on your audio projects can help clear up misunderstandings, share feedback, brainstorm ideas, or request edits that can contribute to making your audio project the best it can be. For example, if you’re working on a musical composition and need to communicate where audio edits need to be made, such as adjusting EQ, Notetracks can be used as one of the best music collaboration apps to achieve easy remote collaboration on audio files.

To begin making comments and notes, make sure you’re in the ‘Comment’ pane at the top middle of the workspace. You can use the playback controls at the bottom of the workspace to navigate along the track to where you’d like to leave a comment. Alternatively, you can do the same by clicking and moving the playhead across the waveform.

In the top left of the toolbar, click the ‘New Comment’ button, type in your feedback, and press post.

You are also able to leave comments/notes on a specific duration of your track, such as from 0:10–0:20. You can do this by clicking and dragging your cursor along the waveform to what section you’d like to note, and then release your click to have the comment box appear.

You also have the option to collaborate remotely on an audio project by sharing voice comments. Voice comments can be useful for those who prefer to verbally describe their feedback, or those on the go, such as a band on tour looking to quickly record comments on a new track with Notetracks being used as an online music collaboration app.

To do this, click the microphone icon in the bottom left corner of the comment box, press the red record button, and leave your feedback. Press post to have your voice note show up directly in your audio project, where it can be replied to by your collaborators.

To further collaborate on audio remotely, Notetracks has additional annotation options that can be taken advantage of. These annotation tools can be especially useful for denoting instrumentation, labelling sections of your track (such as a verse for a song), marking up audio, and communicating ideas with remote collaborators in a visual fashion.

To access these tools, navigate to the ‘Draw’ pane and click. You’ll be greeted by a toolbar that includes tags, labels, and a notepad, all with colours that can be selected. If you’d like additional information on how to use Notetracks’ annotation tools, feel free to read our How to Annotate an Audio Recording help post.

For audio engineers, producers, and editors, Notetracks also has capable cloud-based collaborative audio editing with a variety of tools to try out. Remote audio editing alongside other collaborators allows several people to ensure quality, avoid mistakes, and have a quicker turnaround time on projects.

To gain access to these features, switch to the ‘Editing’ pane at the top of Notetracks. Select the waveform you’d like to edit. You’ll now be able to use the editing tools which include Split, Copy, Paste, Add Fade In/Out, Delete, Cut, and Trim. Specifically, for example, using Notetracks as a music collaboration software helps audio editors clean up, refine, and add flair to their songs that contributes to making your audio project the best it can be.

You can also add additional tracks to the audio file to create song mashups and montages, insert sponsored ad reads into your podcast episodes, or add background music to your audio project. You can repeat the steps at the beginning of this help article to add an audio track into the workstation and then begin to edit several files in one space.

If you’d like a more in-depth guide on how to edit your audio files, check out our help article.

Using Notetracks to collaborate on audio remotely will not only improve communication and teamwork, but will also have a positive impact on audio production as a whole. For example, using Notetracks to do online music collaboration can allow band members in different locations to share musical feedback and analysis that can improve it’s impact; remote collaboration on a podcast episode improves quality through the correction of mistakes and employing collaborator feedback to ultimately create a well-produced episode.

Collaborating on audio remotely is just one of Notetracks’ many advantages – find out more about what Notetracks’ can do today.