Some time ago I started using SugarSync, a great tool for easily accessing, synching and sharing files across multiple computers and mobile devices.

While this sounds a bit techy, in reality there are some awesome things you can do with SugarSync. One of them I particularly like as a composer - and that's being able to carry my music portfolio in my pocket.

Now you might think you could just have a playlist setup in iTunes or something and have that stored on your phone, ready to play when needed. Sure, that would allow you to access your music on the go, but what if you wanted to quickly and easily share one of your tracks with someone? Maybe you're a muso wanting to send a demo track or two to a venue manager you just met. A player looking to join a band you've just seen play live. Or a composer keen to share a demo of your work to a prospective client...

SugarSync not only enables you to access and play your music on the go from your phone, but you can simply tap a button to send a link to that track via email. Sweet.

Here's a rundown of a few steps I take each time I finish a new composition. These quick steps make it easy to access and share my music anywhere, anytime, with anyone:

1. When I finish a new track, I use XLD to convert the large WAV file to a more transportable mp3 version
2. I then drag the mp3 to an "mp3s" folder on my desktop, where all my project mp3s are stored
3. This folder is automatically synched to SugarSync, which means that by just dragging the mp3 to this folder, the next time I open SugarSync on my phone I'll have access to the track - including the ability to play it and share it directly with others.

Hope you find this useful. Now get out there and spread your music to the world!

Earlier today a friend asked me how to set up a wireless audio system in his house. I'm sure he's not alone in asking the question, and while there are many resources providing information on how to do this online, the options and conflicting opinions can be pretty daunting at first. So here's a little overview from me to you.

It is pretty simple to set up actually - pretty low tech from a user's perspective and easy to set up once the initial purchases have been made.

There are also a few ways to do this. I'm not an Apple Fanboy but have found that the following Apple-based system is reliable, as long as your WiFi signal is strong enough. Other than your computer, the following two pieces of hardware are all that is needed:

1. An Airport Extreme, used as a wireless router. This is what will stream the music from your computer to other parts of your house. I have previously used non-Apple routers (e.g. Belkin) with varying levels of success. But Apple talking to Apple tends to be much easier to set up and save you hours of fruitless head-scratching and Googling.

2. An Airport Express, used to receive the audio signal streamed from your machine / router. This little unit just plugs into a power point, and has a headphone jack on the bottom. This unit receives the audio sent from your computer (via the wireless router e.g. Airport Extreme), and using the headphones jack you can just plug the output into the stereo / speakers of your choice.

Out of the box you'll be able to set up iTunes to stream audio from your computer to your remote speakers i.e. whatever speakers you have which are plugged into the headphones jack of the Airport Express.

iTunes will do the work to make sure the audio stays in synch, so if you walk away from your computer playing music into another room which is remotely streaming the music, it will all be in synch. Nice.

With these couple of bits of hardware, you will be streaming music from iTunes. If you want to go one step further, you can stream ANY audio from your computer to your remote speakers. e.g. stream online radio, YouTube, system sounds, you name it. This is great if iTunes is not the only program you wish to be tied to when listening to music or audio. To stream any audio, get the brilliant AirFoil from Rogue Amoeba.

Once set up, you can then ready my other tips on optimising the quality of your WiFi signal. More iTunes related audio tips can be found in the iTunes section of my blog.

Hope that helps! Happy listening.

My studio hard drive was running low on space recently, which meant an upgrade to my daily storage and backup systems.

The outcome of this was a transfer of my whole iTunes library from an internal disk to an external. The phrase "hindsight is always 20/20" could not be more true in this case, as in the process I managed to break most of the links iTunes had to its mp3 files! The effect - most files I attempted to play back through iTunes showed a dreaded exclamation mark warning that they would not play back correctly as the actual file could not be located. Argh!

After a little investigation, I ended up purchasing TuneUp. Read on - this is not simply an endorsement...

Most people - such as myself until recently - might remember TuneUp as being an annoying popup which appeared some time back whenever you launched iTunes (unless you disabled the popup).

The program promises to clean your iTunes library, adding in missing tags and missing cover art, generally tidying things up. It also offers to dedupe your library so that multiple instances of the same track are removed.

Now, let me be clear. TuneUp is not a simple matter of one click and everything is sorted. To be honest, I had a frustrating problem with the program in that many times while it was "cleaning" or finding missing info, it would hang. The program requires an internet connection of course, but even when all other browsing and online activity was fine, this thing would hang and need to be restarted to pick up where it left off. Frustrating, especially if you are cleaning a large audio library for the first time.

What is TuneUp good at? The hanging issue aside, it does a good job at finding missing cover art for your tracks. It also does a good job at filling out missing or incorrect detail such as album, track or artist titles.

Deduping seemed to be a little hit and miss for my liking. Especially given that my library contained a lot of broken links given the recent hard drive changes, TuneUp didn't seem to have an ability to prioritise a track in the iTunes library that it could find over one which was a broken link in the library. As such, even on manual review of each duplicate found, it was difficult to choose the correct one to keep.

How did I get around this? A big thank you to the authors of this post titled "How To Remove Broken Songs From iTunes Library". Following these steps, I was able to remove duplicates from my library relatively quickly and easily, ensuring that broken links were completely taken out of the picture.

In summary, if you can handle the frequent need to relaunch the program, TuneUp does a good job of adding missing tags to your audio tracks and finding missing cover art. But this is how to freely and easily remove broken songs from your iTunes library.

Earlier this week I was completing work for a client who required audio output as a WAV file with a 48kHz sample rate. As my audio editing program by default created the track at a sample rate of 44.1kHz (standard for CD audio), converting the sample rate once the music had already been created was a little tricky.

If I knew the required sample rate when I began the project, I could have set up my recording software accordingly. However, changing the sample rate at the end of the recording process was a challenge. Exporting my finished audio at the higher sample rate (converting it from 44.1kHz to 48kHz) naturally resulted in a shortening in the length of the track and an increase in pitch. A quick Google finds that this is a common problem.

There are many ways to approach this challenge. The purpose of this post is to share what I found to be an incredibly easy solution. A simple conversion using NCH Software's Switch Audio Converter (yes, even using the free version!). I'm happy to say as well these guys are Australian!

Switch is available for both Mac and Windows is is a very powerful audio tool. The feature list is large and includes the ability to convert between a pretty exhaustive range of common audio formats, extract audio from video files and DVDs, automatically normalize the audio when converting, and most importantly in my case - it supports a wide range of sample rates when encoding WAV format.

So, my 41.kHz to 48kHz conversion was as simple as dragging and dropping the audio file into Switch, selecting WAV as the output format and changing the encoder setting to 48kHz. The outcome was perfect.

Just wanted to share this quick tip for anyone else who's needed a quick resolution to this same challenge.

Happy converting!

Some time ago I set my home up with a couple of Airport Express units. These enable the wireless transfer of music from iTunes on my Mac computer to another room where the Airport Express is plugged into a stereo. This provides a nice seamless experience as you move from one room to another, with the audio from several different stereos all in sync.

With the popular Remote app for iPhone, it is also possible to control iTunes directly from the phone. All the features you need are there, such as the ability to search, browse by artists and of course play, pause, and navigate from one track to the next.

However, the luxury of controlling iTunes from your phone is only possible if iTunes itself is already open on your computer. A real hassle if you're relaxing in another room and get the urge to put some music on without iTunes already open!

There are many solutions to this, with varying levels of additional functionality, cost, and complexity to set up. One simple solution I discovered recently is the free and easy Desktop Controller app. Once setup, this iPhone app lets you launch any app on your Mac via your phone - perfectly solving the issue of being too lazy to leave the couch to go and launch iTunes!

But I had an additional hurdle. When not actively being used, my Mac will go to sleep, needing a password to be entered to wake it up. While this is the case, the Desktop Controller app will not be able to launch iTunes.

The solution - another free app called NetAwake. This very simple app lets you wake your computer remotely via iPhone. Problem solved!

So in summary, if you have the same indulgent need as me to be able to put music on remotely using your phone, even if your computer is asleep, you can do this by installing these three simple FREE apps.

Happy listening!

Whether you are aware of it or not, we've all heard the use of Auto-Tune. Many commercially released songs are tweaked using this technology to "improve" the vocal performance.

A commonly referenced use of the tool is Cher's "Believe" track from over a decade ago. The un-natural sounding, almost robotic tone from the vocal undeniably made the track. It was an entirely new sound for commercial charts and made the ears prick up due to how unusual a sound it was.

Now, Auto-Tune is everywhere. The use of the tool as an effect has cascaded through the years from Cher, through to many "R&B" artists of today such as Usher, Kanye West and Lil Wayne. Smartphone owners can even download the I Am T-Pain app to get "that sound".

Locally I was at first surprised to hear Guy Sebastian using Auto-Tune for its effect on his recent release "Who's That Girl". I respect Guy as a very talented vocalist and songwriter - why would he need to correct his voice? His use of pitch-shifting is testament to the fact that it is now used to capture the modern R&B style in an otherwise already-quality recording.

However the effect is no longer creating a unique sound, but a generic sound to modern pop music. The ability to correct pitch to sit perfectly in tune has created a monotony to modern music. A single episode of Glee is proof enough of that (or if you need further reading material, Google the phrase "Glee autotune").

The issue seems to draw into question the reliance of this vocal correction tool to produce a good performance outcome, rather than recording the right performance (or performer) to start with. It's no longer being used to add a once-fresh flourish to a song - rather, many songs simply could not be made listenable without it.

But on the flip-side, I believe there is a value to Auto-Tune. It's hard to sum up my feelings on the matter any better than Recording Engineer Eric Valentine, discussing techniques he used in the recording of legendary guitarist Slash's solo album "Slash" (Audio Technology Magazine, Issue 76, August 2010, p40):

"I actually get more honest performances from singers when I capture them in a computer. I can edit their performance, for instance tune a really cool performance, where the emotion is exactly what we want but it's a tiny bit out of tune in some places. I'll only nudge things a bit to make sure it's not distracting, meanwhile definitely making sure everything keeps sounding like real human beings singing... It just allows me us to use really great, unreproducible but slightly flawed performances".

This I believe is the key. Use Auto-Tune sparingly - and only to a level so that any minor flaws in an otherwise powerful performance are removed so as not to be distracting in a recording. Use of Auto-Tune in LIVE performance though? Hell no!

After all, it's the human-ness of a performance we all want to see in the live environment, right? Some duff notes and on-stage personality are part of the reason we go to live shows. To err is human and to share that experience can provide a level of connection and intimacy between the performer and audience that can't be obtained with intent.

To err is human. To rely on a corrective tool for your success is unforgivable.