Someday, we’ll have easy ways to move large amounts of data from one place to another quickly and easily.  Until then, I’ll just continue beating my head up against a wall.

The problem:  The guy who is going to do the mastering on your tracks that you’ve spent much too long coddling and slaving over isn’t going to sit down at your computer and go to it.  No, he actually has a Pro Tools rig across town and doesn’t use Garageband.   Therefore, I need to get him no only my final mix of the song, but make sure he gets every single track within the songs as well because, let’s face it, my newly minted mixing skills may not be enough.  I naively waxed over the phone, “Oh, I’ll just put them in my on-line drop box.  No big deal.”  Well it is a big deal.  Cue Joe Biden; it’s a big f’ing deal.

First off, you can’t just open a Garageband file in Pro Tools.  Incompatible.  You might be able to open the file in Logic and the transport it to Pro Tools, but if you’ve used any loops, effects, etc. then forget about it.  You’d lose the stuff you thought was cool to add in.  It’s not even a good idea to open a Garageband file in another person’s Garageband if you used any loops or effects that didn’t come standard with Garageband. Second, while my MobileMe iDisk can certainly hold the ~4 GB that this album will take up, getting it there might be a problem.  My Qwest connection is letting me upload at a whopping 0.60 Mb/s.  That means if I just moved the file from one place to another, it’d take about 9 hours to transfer everything.  But alas, apparently connection errors are going to pop up if I try moving more than two individual tracks at a time!  So much for no big deal, there is no feasible way to do this without me physically bringing something to him.  I know, I know, he’s just across town, but I’m geek.  I need to spend hours thinking about how there’s a better way out there to do this.

Let’s just say I loaded my “final” .wav version of the songs onto SoundCloud so he could see what he was getting himself into I’ll be delivering him a DVD later…in person.  Next time I’ll come up with a magical way to do this…next time…