5 easy ways to enhance in-person and remote collaboration.
The nature of teamwork has changed substantially over the last few years; especially when it comes to media. More and more creative teams across the world are working remotely and taking advantage of collaboration tools to stay coordinated in real time; and even teams who work in the same place rely on many of those same tools. From daily communication and file sharing to remote editing sessions, revisions, and final delivery, the collaboration tools you use can make a massive difference in your team’s productivity.
5 Tools for Collaborative Audio Editing (Beyond the Digital Audio Workstation)
Whether you’re a sound supervisor in charge of an audio post team, a podcast producer outsourcing your sound editing to a freelancer, or any kind of team where multiple people work with audio, these tools can help you stay on the same page, work in real time, and empower team members to do their best work.
1. ClickUp: Seamlessly Manage Complex Projects
Even before any editing gets done, you need a system to help manage projects, assign work, and track progress. Without this solid foundation for your workflow, you could end up spending more time juggling emails and coordinating schedules than you’ll spend in actually working in the studio. Every team needs a project management and collaboration platform, and sound teams are no exception.
At Pro Sound Effects, we use ClickUp to keep everyone in sync and make sure all of our library releases, SoundQ updates, and web content get completed without a hitch. ClickUp provides features like project and goal management, time tracking, chat, and more; all with a clean interface that stays out of your way. Creative teams in particular will appreciate its integrations with other collaboration apps like Dropbox, Google Drive, Github, and YouTube.
2. SoundQ: Easily Organize, Search, and License Sound Effects
If your company relies on a shared sound effects library, you need a way to organize your database efficiently, quickly find the sounds you need, and get them into your editing software quickly. And because we’re talking about teamwork here, you’ll also need admin tools for managing your team, onboarding a new team member, and setting access privileges.
SoundQ is our free desktop app for macOS and Windows that makes it easy to organize your local sound effects library, access PSE’s free cloud library, search the Freesound.org database, and purchase individual PSE sound effects or full libraries.
Make collaboration easier for your team with SoundQ’s advanced file organization and search capabilities, shared Collections for in-house file sharing, and one-click importing into Pro Tools, Reaper, or Premiere.
3. LISTENTO: Enable Everyone to Hear the Same Pro Tools Project
When you need real-time feedback from remote team members or clients, not just any kind of audio streaming will do. Sharing your computer sound over a service like Zoom subjects it to lossy data compression, latency, and possibly dropouts, making it impossible for anyone to hear what you’re hearing. To collaborate effectively in real time, you need a way to instantly and securely share high-quality audio streams with anyone, anywhere.
LISTENTO by Audiomovers is a plugin that allows you to stream lossless audio straight from your editing software to the web with ultra-low latency, allowing your collaborators to listen in just by clicking a link. It's probably the best tool if you want to share a Pro tools project remotely.
LISTENTO even supports multichannel streaming, so you and collaborators can work on surround or spatial audio content with anyone who has a compatible speaker system. No audio files are ever hosted by Audiomovers, and for sensitive or high-stakes projects, you and collaborators can set passwords and even generate random session names to avoid any possible leaks.
4. Frame.io: Share, Review, and Comment on Video and Audio Files
Whether you work in film, television, music, podcasting, or advertising, revisions and edits are a huge part of the collaborative process. From sharing drafts with your fellow sound artists to taking feedback from leadership and getting final approval from clients, you need a cloud-based platform to help you manage the process end-to-end.
There are several great options for file hosting, but our favorite at Pro Sound Effects is a cloud service called Frame.io. Frame.io allows teams to share video and audio in full quality, leave notes and comments at specific times, track file versions, and more. Rather than sending emails back and forth with lists of notes and links to files, Frame.io streamlines the whole revision process.
Anyone with a link (and permissions that you set) can access a file in the cloud, make and reply to comments, and even draw on videos to point things out. Another team member can then resolve each item as you address the feedback, upload a new version to the same link, change the file status from “Needs Review” to “Approved,” and so on.
5. PSE Teams Plans: Give Your Team Access to Premium Sound Effects
So far, we’ve focused on software and browser-based cloud tools for collaborative sound editing, but none of that work can get done without the sound effects themselves.
Pro Sound Effects offers customizable multi-seat plans for teams that give you access to all the sound effects you could possibly need at a price that makes sense at any scale. Whether you work with a major studio or small group of sound artists, our licensing specialists will work directly with you to create a custom package that meets your needs, fits your budget, and exceeds your expectations.
With a deep pool of sound effects at your disposal, simple licensing, and personalized customer support, your team will be able to spend more time collaborating.
Common Issues and How to Avoid Them
Even with all of the best tools at your disposal, teams are made up of humans, and nobody’s perfect. Whatever your editing pipeline looks like, you can expect issues to crop up from time to time. But the difference between a minor hiccup and a totally derailed audio project is how you deal with it – the best teams react quickly, adapt, and improve their process to make sure the same mistake never happens twice.
Here are just a few common issues you might run into:
- Miscommunication
- Creative differences
- Bottlenecks
- Technical difficulties
- Scope creep
- Cybersecurity threats
- Legal complications
To learn how to prevent these issues before they crop up, react appropriately when things get complicated, and equip your team to do their best work, check out the Pro Sound Effects Ultimate Sound Workflow Guide for Teams: a comprehensive PDF packed with helpful tips, resources, and real-world advice from professionals working in film, animation, broadcast, advertising, and game development. Start leveling up your collaborative workflow today!
