Tips & Techniques:File Management (using dates)

'year/month/day' formatted dates sort alphanumerically.

'day/month/year' (UK) and 'month/day/year' (USA) standards do not.

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Think about it: Under the UK system, the 1st of December sorts in front of the 2nd of January because 1 comes before 2. And in America Jan the 1st 2008 comes before the December the 1st 2007 because 01 comes before 12.

So I name my files YYYYMMDD
SongTitle19990629.wav
SongTitle20071210.wav
SongTitle20080103.wav
SongTitle20080109.wav

Works for session files too.

Versions of the same day get suffixed a, b, c etc

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Date are more logical than descriptives like... 'final mix', 'final final mix', 'final final mix THIS ONE', new final mix, 'new new final mix unmastered reverb +EQ' etc etc etc etc.

And if you use the YYYYMMDD format, they'll sort alphanumerically on a computer and you'll be organised.

[jahtao]

"children of the revo-loo-ooh-shunnn..."

: )

[Trebor Flow]

I used to use a date in this exact way.

Then changed to simply : song title 01, song title 02, song title 03 etc

If a make a change it becomes another digit up. The reason I dropped the dates is because I was becoming wound up about how long I was working on particular song - "man have I been at this tune for 6 months!!"

With a simple number I free mysef of worry about time. Music is timeless.

Really does work better for me and my troublesome OCD.

Trebor

I did that all the time before Tiger. Now I just sort them by date.
Spotlight also freeed me up spending time on organizing things. Now it's all messy but I can find stuff instantly.

It's a shame really

[pan]

I name my files with the three first or apparently useful letters

"Don' let the sun go down on me" would get the prefix "dlt".

So every audiofile I create is related with a song.

This practice avoids problems in a backup situation: "Please select audiofile:

Bass#7 Path:/where

Bass#7 Path:/is

Bass#7 Path:/the

Bass#7 Path:/correct

Bass#7 Path:/file

Bass#7 Path:/?"


I find myself keeping files sorted by date ... more importantly I keep a rigid Folder Structure for being able to go back but keeping the used audio pool in a single folder.

Sometimes you have to clean up and move or copy a certain state of the session being able to leave several GB behind and condense a Session to a single folder that inhibits the current state i.e. dltDrums MM_YY, dltGuitars3, MM_YY, dltLVoxDD_MM, dltRoughMIXDD_MM, and so on.

I want to be able to save a song in it's current state in a single folder
to be able to make a secure backup of all involved files.

[JLit]

Very logical tip/useful. I found myself naming sessions/ FINAL Final-REAL FINAL", etc... So thanks for this tip, saved my butt more then I can say my previous methods did (which only caused problems). Thank yOU!

[Robo]

'final mix', 'final final mix', 'final final mix THIS ONE', new final mix, 'new new final mix unmastered reverb +EQ' etc etc etc etc.

Lol - this is so, so true. Ridiculous really. Perhaps we should just not be so confident in our final mixes being final mixes in the first place, and work in reverse:

....not really final mix.wav
....getting closer but still not final mix.wav
....final mix without the extra bits that will make it actually the final mix.wav
....actual final mix but will be sent of to someone else who will make it back into not the final mix.wav

You know it's all Bill Gates' fault. This should be taken care of for us without us having to think about it. Just blame Bill Gates - even if you're on a Mac.

[DuroSonics]

Hi
Song title and version number (Ex: At Last 001)
Scott.