Sending & Receiving Large Files

Lately I’ve been doing some vocal recording in my home studio for a friend of mine. His producers/mixers/collaborators/etc that perform the final mix downs of the tracks live in either New York, Chicago, LA, or pretty much everywhere else other than where I live (Minneapolis).

As you may know, PCM Wav files can run very large very quick. If I record _one_ song with backups, fill ins, chorus, hooks, ad-libs, etc I can easily hit 40-50 individual tracks. Each track being when mixed down through Adobe Audtion is about 35 MB each. As you can see, this could easily be anywhere from 1.4-1.7 GB real quick.

Sending the Files

When sending files like this its quite normal that the other party who wants the files DOES NOT have a FTP server. Therefore it turns this simple task into some what of a PITA.

I’ve used many large file transfer sites and recently I’ve decided to stick with SendSpace.com for awhile. They have a Windows wizard which allows you to drag/drop files to upload and your computer will just crunch away on them in the background. The files get uploaded and the end user gets an email specifying where they can pick up their file.

There is a file size limit here of 300MB. However, I’ve noticed that anything over 180MB really starts to get choppy and more or less slows everything down. Therefore I keep my zips to about 150 MB. If I have 1.5 GB of files, I’ll break it into n-number of .zip files that contain x number of files. Essentially, I end up with about 10-12,  150MB zip files. I use the wizard to upload the files for me. I drag and drop them into the wizard and it lets me know when all of them are done uploading.

Downloading the Files

Some people do not like to have to download each individual file … they like to have one big download. Unfortunately this doesn’t work that well when they don’t have their own FTP space. Therefore they have to download each file, one at at a time. Using HTTP to do this, well, it can suck – mainly because it takes time. However, you can get around this by using some common sense and a tool.

Personally I’ve used Orbit Downloader. It’s free and does the job well. I can open each link that I need to download and paste it the download manager. Then I can queue up all of my files and go do something else while they download.

Simple solution to a simple problem.