Organizing Production

So, I'm curious about how people organize their work. I've been organizing all my files by month. Every month gest a new folder. Do you organize by style? until you hit a track limit? A theme? How does one deside that a certain collection gets published? I'm curious.

I archive my done tracks by month seperate from the scraps. the scraps are timeless, like a bargain bin.

I have no organisation

I have a so called nomenclature. For example when my track is called "hellomelody", in the folderstructure the versions look like this: 110512_hellomelody_V017.wav (or any other filenamespecific ending). first year month day (because of chronological order year has to be first), then name, then version. Version gets one number higher after each non-automatic save.

I organize all my stuff in a clusterfuck, when it's gotten out of hand it's moved to backup harddisk, never to be looked at again. Then I start building a new clusterfuck.

I put everything into two different folders. One's called 'shit' and the other one 'notshit'. Curently there are 3 files in the folder 'notshit' and 267 in 'shit'.

lol

I now organise my projects to absurd levels. Each potential album I make is a git repository. I have a handy history of every change I've made to every one of my tracks. Occasionally a particular track will start to seem better suited to a different project, and I'll move it into the appropriate repository, but otherwise I'm about as methodical at organising my music as I am at organising my day job's code.

Yuh I write albums... so I typically set up a folder with a temp name, make all my tracks for that album in that folder.

I name my projects things like "180 D funky" so I know what the bpm, key, and a short description is of a song. Eventually when it takes shape or has an actual title I rename it.

I just keep all finished tracks in a folder on my desktop called "New Album" Any WIP's are usually MP3's on my desktop or in my dropbox for easy sharing w/ friends for feedback. Finished albums and things that won't be used go into my MP3 directory on my storage drive for future listening experiences.

-things that sound like complete pieces of music

-things that sound like demo tracks

-things that sound like loops/weird noise experiments/sheet music

It's really sort of vague, though, because I tend to take things from all three categories & make new versions that sound totally unrelated.

i'm pretty bad about keeping it sorted on the PC. if i have a track name i'll use it, otherwise project files are just like RIGHTEOUSSHEBOMPY.cpr or whatever else i happen to make up when it's time to name the thing. i tend to be a bit more organized on my MPC, project/sample names there tend to be deliberate. partially due to the fact that i recycle a lot more on the MPC than i do on the PC, but also the MPC has a cellphone keyboard and it's harder to keymash. my PC-only tracks tend to be more obvious because they're like bonky.cpr bonky2.cpr bonky3.cpr and so on as i've compulsively saved ten different versions over five hours of working. and because i've been staring at it, i usually remember the project names.

months later, though, i've had to resort to timestamps to find a project file i want, so i should probably be better about that !

i guess i have one bit of useful advice: i kept a notebook, for a while. pen and paper, spiral bound. that helped a lot, while i kept it up.

My music directory is divided into 'Recordings for other people'/'collaborations'/'solo work'. From there a series of folders are nested according to year, then season, then the initial project name. Within each project folder I then have the following:

A folder for all recorded audio files

A folder containing local copies of every pre-existing audio element introduced into the project. (samples, etc.)

A folder with all of the stereo bounces that I periodically create in order to listen to a track outside of the session.

A folder with local copies of every Reaktor ensemble or soft synth patch that I created for the project

A folder for all old versions of the DAW session I have saved, which is many. It's not unusual to have ten iterations in which the title of the session also changes to reflect my latest name for the track. Example: Sample Test -> Sample Test 1.2 -> Rabid in the Dunktank 1.3 -> Rabbits in the Dunktank 1.4 -> Robots in the Dunktank 1.5, etc...

A folder for any MIDI files, if they appear.

I learned a long time ago that it can be a tremendous pain in the ass to dig up old work that has not been archived properly. Now if I want to reopen something from 2007 I have no problem.

  On 5/12/2011 at 1:08 PM, BCM said:

I have no organisation

I have a few hundred folders but I tend to remember the names of most stuff that I finish.

yyyymmdd-0a

I tend to just hae a folder filled with works in progress, and some of them I keep working on, some get forgotten. Then once in a while I go through them all have a jolly old time remembering what could have been (and what still could if I finished more tracks I guess).

sorry for bringing this up again,.... but

Was just thinking about Autechre and how they said ( from what I remember) they had one folder for works in progress...

I've started organizing files also by using OSx color coding to help bring out the projects that seemed more interesting.

periodically I will label the Key that the project is in. Some times I make multiple tracks inside the same Ableton project and wonder if people generally extract songs out to their own projects or work on them within the same project.

Like this -

I used to do all the folder stuff before realising it was meaningless. Bitches, i got .dll files from Ghosts in the folder of Pro Evolution Soccer 2014 which won't load the game. So i just end up listening to this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPbdWuBHIEw&feature=kp

I'm terrible at organization. Any tips?

  On 2/5/2014 at 12:10 AM, LimpyLoo said:

I'm terrible at organization. Any tips?

join the army

  On 2/5/2014 at 1:18 AM, Brian Tregaskin said:

 

  On 2/5/2014 at 12:10 AM, LimpyLoo said:

I'm terrible at organization. Any tips?

 

join the army

 

thanks!

*joins the army and gets killed*

  On 2/5/2014 at 1:21 AM, LimpyLoo said:

 

  On 2/5/2014 at 1:18 AM, Brian Tregaskin said:

 

  On 2/5/2014 at 12:10 AM, LimpyLoo said:

I'm terrible at organization. Any tips?

 

join the army

 

 

thanks!

 

*joins the army and gets killed*

 

*problem solved* zing!

lol

Buzz/Renoise files are organised into folders by year, and then filenames are something like this: '2014-02-04 blah blah.xrns'

Reaper projects are loosely organised by associated bands/projects, and sometimes organised by release.. sometimes.

Other than that.. I'm pretty lazy really. I generally know where to find everything though, and if I do forget about something, I'm pleasantly surprised when I stumble upon it later.