Whether working in Music or Post, sharing ideas as the job progresses can get clunky. Setting out to ditch the tangle of messenger apps, emails, and texts, we check out Nugen’s Jotter that keeps everything in one place.
Getting The Memo
Abandoned giving mixes any name that with the word “Final” in the title? While post projects tend to have many stakeholders, smaller music projects often involve just the engineer and the artist. Whatever the scale of the production, having an exchange of messages to inform the final result is the norm.
While email still plays a role in this process, inevitably clients and others are going to jump on the nearest available channel to get their thoughts across to the person in the chair. Over the duration of even a short project, communications can often get spread out across quite a few media; engineers who are handling everything can certainly add wrangling messages onto their to-do list.
Ways To Do It
For collaborators, there have been a number of ways to keep everything in one place, and for some, The Cloud is the place to be. Whether corporate or indy, projects can benefit a lot from using tools such as cloud-based documents for notes, as well as it being a convenient place to drop the mixes while they are there. Other options can see everyone agreeing on either email or a messenger app. Whatever the medium, the engineer can then collate and act upon tweaks. One way to keep on top of these is to use DAW project versioning such as “song_guitarist_email_19_april” to keep track.
Nugen Jotter
Seeing a way to get everyone talking in the same place, Nugen’s recently announced Jotter goes one further. Calling itself a “timecode-linked note taking tool”, this handy utility allows both clients and engineers to make notes either along its timeline (linked to the audio’s timescale), or globally on a per-document basis. While engineers can use the Jotter plugin across any track or master, importantly, clients can use the free standalone app. Stakeholders can then share .csv files generated in Jotter.
Nugen describe Jotter:
Jotter is a brand new utility plug-in for making notes and comments, designed with collaboration in mind. Simply insert Jotter anywhere in your project, and add annotations locked to the timecode. These can be shared between collaborators either via the plug-in, or via an exported .csv file. Jotter can also be used as a standalone application in situations where a DAW is either unavailable or simply not required.
Available formats: AAX, VST3, AU and AudioSuite in 64-bit.
Standalone system requirements: Mac OSX 10.13 / 512 MB RAM, Windows 7 / 512 MB RAM
On The Same Page
In the video we show how a client can annotate mixes for the engineer to act upon. Those involved have options to use incremental saves, or to overwrite entire files when using the Add To Current Notes option. Users could further streamline Jotter notes by using a common .csv in a shared sync’d location. Certainly, it could make the disparate trail of texts, messenger threads, and emails a thing of the past. The only challenge might be getting everyone to use it…