Sharing mixes with clients

The worst feedback loop in mixing is the email reply. You send an MP3 on Monday. On Thursday the client sends back a paragraph: "I think the vocal around 1:42 sounds thin, and somewhere near the bridge the drums get weird." You open your session, find 1:42, and the vocal sounds fine. The client wrote that note from memory, four days after listening once on a phone speaker while making dinner. Now you're guessing what they actually heard.

A review link fixes the memory problem. The client opens the link in a browser, listens to the same file you have, and leaves notes at the exact timestamps where they heard something. When their notes come back, every one of them points at a specific second of the track. This guide covers the full share flow - creating the link, what the collaborator sees, what comes back to you, and how to use it without annoying your clients.

Creating a share link

In the library, hover any file and click the share icon (or open the file and use the share button in the header). Mix Notes uploads the audio to a private cloud bucket, generates a unique share URL, and copies it to your clipboard in one step. You'll see a "Link copied!" confirmation.

The share URL is {your-domain}/share/{slug} where {slug} is an 8-character random string. Unguessable in practice, but not password-protected. Anyone with the link can open it. That's a feature for quick collaboration, but worth knowing if the mix is under NDA - keep the link private and don't post it anywhere indexed.

Sign-in is required to generate a share link (the cloud upload is tied to your account). If you're not signed in, clicking share opens the auth modal first.

What your collaborator sees

The share page has two flavours depending on whether the visitor is signed in.

Anonymous visitors get a read-only player: the track loads, they can play/pause, scrub, and listen, and that's it. There's a prompt at the bottom inviting them to create an account if they want to annotate. No library, no mode switcher, no annotation buttons - just the audio.

Signed-in visitors have the file added to their own Mix Notes library automatically, then redirect into the full player. From there they can drop their own timestamped notes exactly like you do on your own files. See how to annotate a mix for the capture flow they'll be using.

That means the realistic workflow for getting feedback from a client is: send them the link, and ask them to create a free account. Account creation is a single step - email plus password - and the tradeoff for that one-time friction is real timestamped feedback instead of a paragraph from memory.

Getting their notes back

When a signed-in collaborator annotates the shared file, those notes attach to the file in their library. What shows up on the share page itself is the owner's live annotations - if you update your notes, the share page reflects them. The notes a collaborator adds on their own copy stay on their copy.

For a direct "their feedback into your library" loop, the best approach right now is to have the collaborator share their annotated version back to you using the same share flow. You'll receive a link, open it, and the file appears in your library with their notes attached.

It's an extra hop compared to a native comment-back flow, but it keeps the trust boundary clean: nobody can add notes to your library without permission.

Sending revised mixes

When you bounce a new version, create a fresh share link for the new file. Don't reuse the old one. Each link is tied to the specific upload at the moment you shared, so pointing the client at a new URL also gives you a clean record of what feedback came on which version.

There's currently no UI to revoke a share link from inside Mix Notes. If you stop sharing a link, it still resolves for anyone who has it. If that's a problem for a sensitive project, avoid sharing the file or delete the source file from your library entirely - the share page will show "not found" once the underlying record is gone.

Best practices

A few things that make this loop actually work.

Frame the ask. Don't send a bare link. Tell the client what you want feedback on. "Focus on vocal balance and the low end - the structure is locked so don't worry about arrangement notes." A client without direction will give you 40 notes, half of which you can't action. A client with direction will give you 6 that matter.

Set expectations on revision rounds. If you're pricing mix revisions, put the limit in the email that contains the link. "This covers one round of revisions. Anything after that is hourly." Mix Notes doesn't enforce this for you, but the link makes it easy for a client to leave 80 notes, so the guardrail has to come from you.

Send a new link when you send a new mix. Don't reuse the old URL and hope the client notices. Keep one link per version of the mix.

Don't respond to individual notes. Read all of them first. Some contradict each other. Some will be resolved by other changes. Don't engage in a back-and-forth on timestamp 0:47 while there's a completely different issue waiting at 2:15. Make your pass, send the revised mix, and let the next round surface what's still outstanding.

Voice notes from clients are gold. Text comments tend to get clipped to the bare observation. Voice notes capture tone - you can hear when a client is genuinely excited vs grudgingly accepting. That signal is worth a lot when you're trying to figure out which notes matter most. See recording voice notes on a mix for why.

Warn clients up front that they'll need a free account to leave notes. If that's a dealbreaker, the anonymous listen-only view still gives them the file in a browser without anything to install - they can reply with timestamps by email in the old-fashioned way.

What's next

Once the feedback is coming back in a form you can actually work with, how to annotate a mix covers the capture flow you'll use during revisions. Using AB mode for reference tracks is useful for sanity-checking your revised mix against a reference before sending. Recording voice notes on a mix is worth a read if you want to record your own spoken responses for the client.

Or open the app, pick a file from your library, and send the first link.