Ableton Forum

Well, somewhat seriously, yes. I'm not a computer minded person. It doesn't come naturally to me, this stuff.

I've been trying for a few hours to upload some songs. I didn't mean can anyone guide me step by step or anything. It's not hard to actually upload a song (or try to anyway), but I meant are there any particular websites that are good, or any tips on how to do this quicker/easier, etc...?

For example, as I said, I've spent hours this afternoon trying to upload some songs. Most sites won't let me upload .wav files, but that's ok for now. I'll use a free online converter to change them to mp3 at some stage soon.

My main problem is they take SO long to upload! I sat waiting for over 2 hours today for one song to upload. Then when it had finally finished, my session had timed out and when I logged in again, nothing had happened. No song was there, no upload had taken place. 2 hours wasted!! And 2 hours isn't even that long apparently. The website (AirPlay Direct) said uploads can take between 5 minutes and 5 hours depending. So...how do you stop your session from expiring during the upload!? Stuff like this is what I want to know from more experienced people.

Hehe, OK.

You're right that a lot of places won't let you upload wavs (which is fair enough really as in general, wavs are pretty big files and mp3s aren't) - so you need to convert to mp3. Do you have iTunes? iTunes will convert from wav to mp3 and does a good job of it.
Don't bother with online conversion as you'll have to upload your wav which as you've experienced, can take a very long time! If you don't have iTunes you can download it for free, or there are a wealth of free wav-mp3 converters out there (just google it)

One thing to consider is the quality of the mp3 - try to convert to as high quality as you can - I always use 320kbps. Once you've done this, the resulting mp3 will be considerably smaller than the original wav (e.g. a 7 minute tune as wav for me is about 100Mb or more, as 320 mp3 is about 16 or 17Mb). So straight away you can see this is going to upload quicker! And you now have a format that most sites are happy with.

Where to upload??? Good question, lots of people will have different opinions. Myspace is pretty universally recognised and a lot of people on here use it. I do have a Myspace account, but personally I don't really like it - they seem to compress your audio too much and the sound quality ends up not that good. Much better (and my personal favourite) is Virb.com - again, lots of people here use it - check the link in my signature to get an idea. Better quality audio - and they are more than happy with 320kbps mp3. The advantage with these types of sites is that you can let people play your songs, without actually letting them have a copy! (I actually allow downloads from virb periodically, but it's all up to you).

Another option is just to use a file sharing site (rapidshare, yousendit, sendspace, etc) - these will allow you to upload much bigger files and format will not be a problem (wav/zip/mp3/whatever) - but then you can only allow downloads and people will not be able to stream it online.

Hope this helps. If not, come back!