In this week's Friday Free Plug-in, we are featuring Studio Collect from Veva Sound.

What Is The Studio Collect Plug-in?

Studio Collect is designed to be a simple interface residing in the insert section of your favourite DAW including Pro Tools allowing you to gather all important information (metadata) about your recording session whether it’s just you or a full production with many different contributors.

They have made it DDEX-RIN compliant to offer a seamless integration into the digital supply chain. It will gather information on time signature, tempo, musicians, writers, producers, PRO’s, splits and more.

Why Use The Studio Collect Plug-in?

Veva Sound apparently created this plug-in as a result of nearly two decades of working with producers, engineers and artists within studios, collecting metadata, preserving large catalogs, and working with major labels. Deborah Fairchild, Veva’s Executive Vice President explains...

From VEVA’s years of working with major labels, we’ve learned how to organise and gather metadata. We’ve had engineers send us information in texts, emails, Word documents, spreadsheets. Often the responsibility falls on the mix engineer who wasn’t part of any of the recording process and truly doesn’t know who played on the tracks, so tracking down this data takes time and is sometimes inaccurate. There are lots of legitimate complaints about the lack of credits, but there are also many reasons engineers and other contributors aren’t getting credited (or inaccurately credited) because the credits aren’t being collected while the music is being created.

The SCP plug-in has been designed to support the recording engineer's data collection efforts as they work on a session in real time. Based on the international DDEX RIN standard, the plug-in encourages engineers to add the appropriate information as they work on the session. The plug-in then offers the option of generating and sharing a fully compliant RIN (recording information notification) as a PDF or XML file.

The plug-in is the first part of the Studio Collect Suite that Veva plans to roll out later this year, which will provide a wider, more powerful set of tools for managing data, files, and workflow in the recording studio. Deborah Fairchild continues...

The plug-in is a basic but highly functional version of what the platform will provide. It has flexibility, and gives you prompts when you want to create a RIN file. To submit a RIN requires a minimum fieldset and it flags the basic information and asks you to fill it in. And, it is free. These files form the basis for all music metadata, this vital information that determines track credits, searchability, and royalty payments.

An Example Of How Sound Collect Could Help

An example could be when a music supervisor asks you for a song between 85-100 bpm, minor key, in 3/4 with tambourine and glockenspiel. Open your database, generate your report, select the songs that fall into this category and send it to her asap- increase your odds of getting the sync and licensing opportunity by responding within minutes instead of days or weeks.

System Requirements

The Studio Collect plug-in supports AAX, AU and VST plug-in formats and has been designed to be DAW agnostic and work with all the main DAWs on the market including Pro Tools.

How Do I Get This Plug-in?

Go to the Veva Sound website, click the Free Download button and then complete the form by first providing your name and email address. Next, you will need to agree to the End User License Agreement and then click on the Submit button. You should then receive an email from Veva Sound, click on the Free Download button and the plug-in installer will download.

You will then need to unzip the download file and inside you will find folders for both Mac and Windows versions of the plug-in. There are no installers, instead, you will find alias folders of the appropriate plug-in folders on your system. So installation is a matter of dragging and dropping the appropriate plug-in into the alias of the appropriate plug-in folder. 

Who Are Veva Sound?

VEVA Sound was founded in 2002 in Nashville, TN. For the past 16 years, they have worked to define, create and implement the standards for how sound recordings are preserved and monetized. Through partnerships with The Recording Academy, The Library of Congress, DDEX, NDSA and NDIIP, they are creating technologies which allow their clients to identify and properly credit their music collections, whether they be legacy recordings stored on analogue or digital tape or current projects.