Rough Cuts Ltd Blog

For generations before music streaming every record on earth became a thing, there have been music lovers known as collectors. Discerning music lovers who will audition, listen, share, and ultimately 'collect' albums to add to their ever growing library. People who would selectively spend their money on supporting artists they loved, by buying albums instead of paying subscriptions to global corporations who are known to pay a pittance to artists .  Collectors total album count are their badge of honour, their knowledge of each artist and history, their passion. In the 1970s Vinyl was the collectors medium of choice. For portability in the early 80's Cassette's become almost as popular (although not for the true audiophiles). Then in the mid 80's the Compact Disc became the long term winner for many millions of collectors and in the late 90's MP3 made it's first appearance. With low bandwidth and small hard disk drive sizes, the best we could realistically h...

The transfer is complete, my music collection that I have enjoyed listening through Google Play Music for the best part of a decade has now moved to the new improved cash machine that is Youtube music.  The end of an era, the end of listening to albums cast to my hifi at 320kbps.  So what is my problem with Youtube Music? Let's start with the least infuriating feature. Finding an individual album (that I own and have uploaded) is now incredibly difficult. Albums and Artists are listed on separate tabs. Tap either, through the web or the app, and you're presented with the YouTube Music Artists you have bought, which is none, so I have to manually switch it to uploaded. If I'm looking at Albums, they're not listed in artist order, but album title. With 10,000 songs, that's a lot of albums to scroll through and loading time isn't great, so getting to 'The Seldom Seen Kid" or anything lower down in the alphabet takes forever. But there is an easier way, bei...

As I have recently found out, having a team member leave a shared Google Drive can be infuriatingly complex . The best way to handle a shared Google Drive is by using an admin account for the organisation. All of the folders within a share, should be managed by this one account. If they are created by the key member representing the organisation, then the sharing permissions for the folder can be managed by the admin. The admin can remove people from the share, or share the folder or files with other people. Other team members should not create new folders within the Parent folder. Other team members should, as a matter of course (for their sake as well as the organisation, upload folders, but as a matter of habit, make the owner of the file or folder the orgnisation's admin account. If you already have an active share with hundreds of valuable files, between a number of people, then you can prepare for future issues (someone moving on) in a couple of ways. There may be better ways...

Let's say you collaborate on a project with some people. You decide between you that Google Drive is the way you're going to share the work and you find for the initial period, workflow is good and you're contributing, editing and sharing in equal measure. The way collaborative work should be. Then as the project matures, so do people's intentions and goals. Maybe one goes on to start and collaborate with another group of people, their contribution to the project was more relevant at launch and now they want to respectfully go their separate ways. How do they reclaim the space back from their drive. How do they (or you) remove them from the share and how do we ensure confidentiality on future work? Well that's where things get interesting. Lets call the guy who is part of the remaining team, the new leader, A and the person leaving Z. Before we dig in, I'd like to point out that I am admin for other G Suite partners, and a Google Certified Educator. I know my wa...