New workflow for reviewing mixes

I wrote a couple weeks ago about the importance of reviewing your mixes and all the things you can learn from this discipline. Up until recently, my workflow to accomplish this involved physical media – either burning a CD at FOH or grabbing a copy of the service DVD after the fact. My favorite way to review is to listen in the car after a service since I have a 30 minute drive each way, hence the CDs. The problem with this workflow is obvious – literally at least 50 CDs from old services cluttering up my car, keeping the blank CD stockpile ready to go, etc. I’ve messed around off and on with recording to a computer and somehow dumping to my iPod/iPhone but never settled on a workflow that was simple and fast enough to surpass the simplicity of CDs. Until now.

Enter Wiretap Studio. I bought the MacHeist bundle for the first time this year and this little gem is one of the apps that came in the package. What this program does is allow you to record audio from just about anywhere on your Mac – skype, streaming audio, line input, etc. It has a really handy library where it keeps track of everything you record and besides basic file editing, once media is in the library, you have lots of options of what to do with it…everything from dumping the raw file to the desktop, straight export to an idisk or iPod, bluetooth transfers. Essentially you name it.

Now, I connect into the line in on my laptop from a console output with the same feed that’s being sent to video world. Record in Wiretap and it spits it out into the Wiretap library. I created storage folders in the library for rehearsals, services, favorite elements, and misc. I like this because it keeps all of these board tapes separate from my iTunes library on the same machine unless a particular clip is strong enough to warrant importing into iTunes and promoting to my regular music library.

But Wiretap is only half the equation. I still need to get the files to my iPhone so I can listen on the drive. In the past, this has been the most complicated part of the equation because my iPhone media library wasn’t paired with the library. I’d messed around with converting my recordings into podcasts which could be sync’d to the phone independent of the rest of my media, but this was clunky and took too long. Enter FileMagnet. This cool little app lets you transfer files via wifi back and forth to an iPhone and play media natively inside the app on the phone without having to add to the phone’s iTunes library. Now I have two media “libraries” on my phone – iTunes and the files transfered with FileMagnet.

The result is a really solid workflow that makes reviewing my mixes SO much easier and neater. Record in Wiretap – export to desktop – drag into FileMagnet – wifi sync with phone.

I don’t know if this would be helpful for anyone else but I think its pretty cool.