Paul Zimmerman stores, syncs and shares his music on a Seagate FreeAgent Go portable storage solution.

By day, Paul Zimmerman is a program manager at tech powerhouse Cisco Systems. But in his spare time, the Santa Cruz, Calif., resident is a rocker, recording bass and keyboard tracks at home on a custom-built digital audio workstation, and then getting together with his band mates to complete the songs.

His tool of choice for easily capturing his riffs and tunes? A 160-GB Seagate® FreeAgent™ Go portable storage solution.

“With FreeAgent, I can drop my work-in-progress files into my bag and I’m off to the studio,” says Zimmerman. “I love its portable design and large capacity.”

Recording digital music consumes big chunks of storage. One song with, say, 20 tracks woven through it can easily consume 800 megabytes, says Zimmerman. A CD’s worth of music can eat up several gigabytes of storage.

“Uncompressed digital audio files aren’t small,” says Zimmerman, “and most of the people I play with aren’t local to Santa Cruz. I need an efficient way to take these files with me. I can’t move those big files easily with flash drives or DVD-ROMs.”

Zimmerman will often keep multiple variations of a bass line that’s he’s been working on, so that when it comes time to gather with his fellow musicians, he’ll have plenty of choices for them. With the huge capacity offered by the compact FreeAgent Go drive, storage space isn’t an issue.

The 40-year-old Zimmerman plays with two bands with very different sounds: Mute Angst Envy (which he describes as a “post-punk/goth” hybrid) and Lisa Dewey and the Lotus Life (with an “ambient, coffeehouse” style). Both bands’ music is available on Apple’s iTunes music store and Amazon.com.

Sync and Share

Zimmerman uses Seagate storage for more than just backing up his work. With the ability of FreeAgent drives to automatically sync to multiple computers, for example, Zimmerman can easily swap files at one of his band mate’s home studios and later return to his own home and update his workstation with the new music. He also likes the fact that he can switch off the drive’s automatic sync option.

Listen Up!

Click here to listen a song from Lisa Dewey and the Lotus Life, featuring Paul Zimmerman. (mp3, 3.8MB)

“This is a key feature for me,” Zimmerman explains. “When I’m recording music on computer, any background operation has the potential to hold up the computer and create a problem with the recording. But if I set the drive to manual sync, I don’t have to worry about the background operation.”

At home, Zimmerman also uses Seagate storage to secure his family’s fast-growing digital content collection. Zimmerman uses a 750-GB FreeAgent Pro external storage solution to back up the digital photos, videos, games, financial records and more that his wife, Christie, and son Grae, 12, have accumulated on the family’s IBM desktop PC.

Whole Lotta Storage

“The FreeAgent Pro has unbelievable storage space,” Zimmerman says. “Before we got this drive, I was afraid of using up our PC’s hard drive space, since we do a lot of multimedia work with that computer. Now, we don’t have to worry about running out of room or going through the hassle of backing up everything on discs. And when it comes time to upgrade to a new PC or internal hard drive, it’ll be easy to sync our files using the FreeAgent Pro.”

Setup for both FreeAgent products was “a piece of cake,” Zimmerman says. “The on-screen instructions were very easy to follow. It just took a few minutes to set up a folder for storing our content and we were good to go.”

Tim Sullivan, VP of sales for Seagate branded solutions, says the Zimmerman family is part of a fast-growing home-storage market that wants “no-hassle, high-quality” storage products that can keep pace with their digital lifestyles.

“Whether you’re a musician or a parent who doesn’t want to lose a single digital photo of a child, our FreeAgent line was designed to make backing up, sharing and syncing digital content an easy experience,” says Sullivan. “The best thing I hear from home users like Paul is that they just don’t have to spend any time worrying about whether our products will perform. Our storage just works, right out of the box.”