How to use an audio collaboration tool

While working on an audio file, such as music, podcasts, and other projects, often you’ll find yourself wanting to collaborate with team members, co-producers, editors, and clients while they’re being created. Notetracks is a robust audio collaboration tool for audio creators, musicians, podcasters, and producers to share their audio files before, during, and after production. Along with providing engineers and producers with an extensive collection of playback, commenting and editing features to use, Notetracks is the perfect platform to use during collaboration-heavy projects, such as podcast episodes, songs, interviews, composition analysis, and more.

To begin using Notetracks as an audio file collaboration tool, open up Notetracks and select the new project button in the top right hand corner.

Then, select ‘Audio’ as your project type and give it a name.

To start using Notetracks as an audio file collaboration tool, you’ll need to share your project. To start, click the ‘Share Project’ button in the top right-hand corner of Notetracks.

You’ll be greeted by a new screen with various sharing options. In the bottom right-hand corner, you can select a specific time-stamp to begin playback on. This will share the track with your collaborator at the exact place in the audio project you’d like to highlight.

To share with a collaborator’s email address, enter it in the invite box and proceed to click ‘Send Invite’. You can use the drop-down menu to change your collaborator’s permissions, including ‘Can edit’, ‘Can comment’, and ‘Can view’. You can also write a message to brief them on the audio project, such as podcast episode drafts or song demos.

If you like, you can quickly share your audio draft with editors via Gmail, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Slack, and Microsoft Teams utilizing the social media buttons.

If you’re looking to have an easy sharable link to your audio project so your collaborators do not have to signup or login, you can make the link completely public by selecting ‘Activate Public Link’, allowing anyone to view, edit or comment on your Notetracks project.

Now that you’ve added your audio collaborators, you and your team are now able to comment, draw on, and edit the project. With these features, you and your collaborators are able to provide feedback directly in the workstation, eliminating the need for additional notetaking and communication applications; edit alongside one another using our impressive library of micro-tools; and even communicate on, label, tag, and colour code sections utilizing the draw tool.

To add the first comment on the  draft, navigate to the top middle of the screen and select the ‘Comment’ pane. After, you’ll want to click the left pane where ‘Comments’ is and click on the drop down menu.

Now, select the ‘New Comment’ button to add feedback precisely at the point you'd like to discuss without having to stop the audio. Ensure to make note of the areas where you think improvements and changes can be made. Sharing your feedback in a succinct way with the team allows everyone to discuss their thoughts on the audio project and clarify any points of confusion.

When it comes to music, podcasts, or audio production, an editor and editing in general play an important role in enhancing the overall quality, clarity, tone, rhythm, and timing. By working together and meticulously editing audio projects, the artistic structure and creation are improved, resulting in a heightened level of focus and enjoyment for the listeners.

For a more detailed guide on how to use Notetracks as an editing app for your audio drafts, please refer to our previous guide, How to Edit an Audio File.

Next, you have the ability to draw and annotate along the audio file as well. To begin, access the drawing pane at the top middle of the screen. Once you’ve done so, a pane with various options will appear. You’ll see five colour choices you can use, a text insertion button, and the notepad icon.

Make sure to expand the “Drawings” sidebar to be able to place your drawings, tags, and labels. Labels are available utilizing the text insertion button, allowing you to label specific parts of your audio file – such as “Ad Break” for a podcast episode, “Intro”, for a song, for example.

You can also use tags, as shown in the toolbar. Tags allow you to denote a type of instrumentation, such as drums, guitar, and more.

If you’re looking to doodle and sketch on your project, switch over to the Notepad tool, double-click on the project where you’d like to leave your drawing, and use the mouse to sketch your idea.

Audio file collaboration tools can be the catalyst to shift your audio projects into a higher calibre. Through streamlining your workflow and eliminating extra apps, you and your team can work virtually side by side with ease. Moreover, using Notetracks as an audio file collaboration software will not only improve communication and teamwork, but will also have a positive impact on audio quality, management, and release. When you create exceptional, well-produced and collaborated-on podcast episodes, music, radio shows, and otherwise, your listeners can become more engaged and grow in size, getting all your hard work out there to a wider audience. Overall, using audio file collaboration tools improves the value of your audio project through the correction of mistakes, management of pacing, and employing collaborator feedback to ultimately produce a high quality project.

Sign up for Notetracks today.