Something interesting

Remote production - I have been doing [remote] production for about 8 years now. Right from inception of my site in Mp3.com till now, the process is kind of similar. My crew is often spread around the globe and I user various communication methods to communicate and get the work done. There is a lot co-ordination and management involved in this process.

Today I am really happy to see many Bloggers take similar path in music production. Working on such remote productions requires proper co ordination. In order achieve efficiency a Music producer or a composer needs to be organized, he or she needs to communicate their requirement clearly to their peers or crew. For example if my good friend Udhaya writes a song for me, I need to communicate my requirements clearly to him. For such communications, we used emails, conference calls through which I will explain the structure of the song etc, Other than email and chat-windows there is no proper tool to facilitate such remote production tasks.

What if , a software tool using which composers can create a track, package it with time coded markers and description and export this as a bundle to the lyric writers, who then using the same tool opens it and gets its instructions, then writes the song and sends it back to the composer as another package? Sounds interesting to you?

Folks, having understood this production nightmare for about a decade now, I went on to develop a software program to facilitate such production tasks. I developed this software using dot NET V2.0 and the Free C# Visual Studio Express from Microsoft.com.
Let me explain program modal and the work flow:
Production - a production is a collection of audio and video bundles.
An Audio bundle consists of an audio file [mp3 or wav or windows media], a time code file and a lyric file. A video bundle – a video file [wmv or mpg], Time code instruction file and a director comments file. User opens a production. Once the production is activated, using the project explorer window [check the screen shots] users can load audio or video packages. Using the work bench windows composers can create markers and its related instructions can be entered. A Marker is a time code in “hh:mm:ss” format. The entire production can be compressed as single file and can be mailed to the lyric writer or programmer etc, who can open it and read the instruction using the same tool. There is simple rich text editor is provided to write lyrics and notes. I have not tested this completely; I think I have addressed all the requirements based on my experience, but there is no such thing as complete software hence if anyone has any ideas to incorporate let me know. I can try to add it.
If you need this tool let me know I will upload this tool some time over the weekend.