Another system I’m using as part of my project work — learned from my programming day job, is to keep a separate README text file inside the project folder. This README file has anything important related to the project that I would like to know without the need to look around inside the Logic or Live projects.

Examples of such small snippets of info are: bpm, key, title suggestions, ideas how to remix it, and so on.

In the case of the podcasting stuff I’m doing, I also need to keep everything consistent, so I need to keep track of the title naming system, meta-data, and so on. Especially in the case of the podcasts, I just option-drag over the README file to the next project folder, and start modifying the already existing material, thus keeping the format and style in place.

The file itself does not need to be a fancy, formatted Word document. It’s so much faster to open and edit a plain old text file…

Here’s my current soundbank configuration. When I do tracks, I will always sooner or later save the original stems such as drum loops, bass lines, pads, and so on, as 24-bit 44.1kHz AIFF or WAV files that I could use later for various other configurations, remixes, new tracks, and so on.

The soundbank has the following main sections. atmos is atmospheric loops such as pads and abstract sounds. bass is of course bass lines. drhihats are all kinds of hihats, open and closed in separate folders. drkicks are the kicks, and drsnares are snares, claps, and abstract snares. drum-hits are all kinds of strong percussion, of which a large part are cymbal hits. effects are of course effects, loops all kinds of drum and sound loops in different folders — I do have the full drum loops and percussion drum loops (usually no kick in those) in separate sub-folders. melodies are some kind of melodic content. patterns are rhytmic loops. voices are of course voice material.

The first New folder is a special case where I drop in fresh loops with the same sections as the ones mentioned before. The reason is that I like to go through new material and I could quickly find them. After use they will end up in the normal folders.

Why this configuration? In my case I’ve learned over the years, that these are the most common musical elements I work with in my tracks. When I do something fresh, just for fun, I could quickly drag in drum loops, a bass line, some atmospheric stuff, patterns, and hey, something is happening where I could then add new content and extend the material.

As for the actual audio files themselves, they also have a special code. In the beginning I try to put in the major or minor key (for example A is A major, and a is a minor), and somewhere in the name I also repeat the sub-name, such as atm (atmospheric sounds) or pat (pattern). The first is obvious, it’s good to get a rough idea what the key is for the loop. The second is for possible quick searches of all loops of a certain kind inside Ableton Live’s browser.

Yes, it takes some house keeping from time to time, but it’s then nice to have everything organized. If I do a DJ mix or something similar, I could quickly find elements I could mix into the track just by going through the specific folder content, same even in a live setup.

I’ve been toying with converting these to Apple Loops as well, but usually I could get by with just dragging in specific loops and converting them on demand. But they all do have the Ableton Live .asd files available with the proper warp mode and possible warp markings in place.

Taking a step back, some might not like organizing their material, and rely on just search tools such as Spotlight with MacOSX. That’s just fine, as well.

I’m just now reading David Weinberger’s interesting book Everything is Miscellaneous, where he points out the new way of looking at information that  Internet is defining, in other words there are multiple ways to find information, using tags, search urls, listings, categories, and so on.

My point is that it’s somewhat good to rely on some mind of organization. The least I want is to sit and hunt for material when suddenly the creative spirit kicks in. But I do think that creating organizational models is very personal, so the more you put in from your own side, the better chance you will use it long term.

One last note about projects. I always, always try to render out temporary material. This way if I’m not sure what a folder contains, I could quickly play the rendered file and know what the folder contains.

OK, here’s the current system how I organize my projects on the disk, and I’ve used it for over three years, and sometimes deviate from it a little bit, but hey, nobody is a robot. I learned it from an article I read long time ago, and it was modified, and I suspect if someone else wants to do something similar, you will make a variation of it.

The whole idea is to keep track of the project status in folders with clear sub-folders, and move them from one state to another during the lifetime of the projects.

I have a top level folder called Recording. Inside this one I have four top-level folders called: 1-Attik, 2-Production Material, 3-Work In Progress and 4-Shelf (the others are for Live and Logic temp recording material). Attik is where I place things that will just gather dust and I might or might not need it in future. Production material is anything I really think is interesting and should be moved to work in progress soon. However, that material could easily get back to the Attik, too. Work in progress is where the active projects reside. Shelf is the final resting place for finished projects.

Inside each one I have the exact same sub-folders, DJ Mixes, Interstitials (short one minute tracks, Performances (DJ recordings), Remixes, and Tracks, There’s also sometimes a Film and Effect section. Biowaves is a forthcoming podcast series, hint hint.

Inside these I have each project with a running number and a prefix, I use KX<four-digit number>, KX is from prefixes I’ve used in private programming projects.

When I then work on individual projects, when I do backups I just drag this same sub-folder to another hard disk, the KX<zzzz> number is the one that will indicate the project. I now also put a short name after it as it’s easier to remember project names than numbers.

Anyway, the trick is to move the projects from one state to another, and also be brave and move things to the Attik in case you know certain projects will certainly just gather dust in the future.

Oh, one last note, inside the project folders I also have a small info folder called “Samples not archived”, so I know which project I have gone through and archived into my SoundBank. Maybe I need to explain how my Soundbank looks like next!

I recently opened opened up an over three-year-old Ableton Live project, and remastered and otherwise redid the contents. It was interesting, and I was very pleased I could open up old Ableton Live projects without any issues.

Which leads to the topic of preservation. It’s good to save projects for later use, remastering and so on. Today it’s even easy, if you want to read about problems and issues, check out how much hard work it’s to go through the archives of Frank Zappa, tapes belonging to old tape recorders no longer in production, analog tapes slowly getting worse, and so on.

Depending on your work flow you might have a DAW project with a combination of MIDI and audio tracks. Most modern DAWs nowadays have a feature of self-contained projects, so always use this. You could then save the project on a hard disk, DVD, and so on, and not worry about broken content links.

In my work flow it’s common I do a lot of initial work in Logic, and I just export the final audio material as 24-bit AIFF files that I then assemble together in Ableton Live. I still save the Logic projects so I could go back and redo or re-edit various MIDI sections. I might even start exporting the pure MIDI tracks as those are good to have around.

One worry is that if you just keep the DAW projects around without any audio dumps, the plugins such as the software synths might not work years in future — we saw already issues with the MacOSX to Intel transition where various plugins, especially VST ones, have not yet been ported over. Or, the public domain synth is no longer actively developed.

You could also use freeze tracks to save the information. Also, both Logic and Live has a feature of dragging freeze tracks into audio tracks, and this way they are saved as pure audio tracks. Anyway, just always preserve your audio projects, if nothing else your grandchildren will have great fun discovering ancient material while they dig through the attic.

I still think the original Linndrum kick was the best electronic kick sound I ever heard.

Anyway, I went through my collection of kicks tonight — every time I finish a project, I just stuff aside the sounds used into my sound bank, and it becomes after a while very non-organized. I wanted to classify them and also go through with Ableton Live and check the sound qualities.

The classification was interesting, I ended up with just four sub-folders, one with house music kicks, one electro/techno ones, one with experimental kicks, and then a dedicated folder for any non-steady four-beat bars. The techno kicks were mostly synthetic, dry, or otherwise dark kick sounds, for example.

When going through the samples, I noticed that the kick sound was in many cases very different between Ableton beat and complex modes. Since the early days we always warped drum sounds with beat mode, complex was not around, and beat worked just fine with non-tonal material. Anyway, I was really surprised to hear that complex warp mode (introduced in Ableton Live 5), actually made some old drum sounds much better, more subtle parts showed up. In other cases the beat mode made the kick sound punchier. Sometimes just one or the other sounded wobbly. So that was another operation I had to do, anyway this is good to know in future.

I also put aside twenty kick drum sounds, they are here in a zip archive format (right mouse-click), and actually in Ableton Live 6.0 project format, but in case you don’t have 6.0, you could get the samples from inside the folder itself. Permission is granted to freely make excellent music with them (but not to redistribute them as a package). I added a set of normal and also experimental kicks for more fun with your music productions. The samples are 24-bit 44.1Khz AIFF and WAV files.

Ok, on our quest to find the Nirvana environment of keeping track of material, for example for DJ use, I tried out the latest Albeton Live 6.0 (b15), and the brand new iTunes 7.0.

This new iTunes is nice as it has now an option to make and select multiple iTunes libraries, hit down the option key when starting iTunes via the icon and you will notice the new dialog box for this option. It means that you could finally have multiple iTunes libraries, one for your DJ collection, one for your listening use (such as Schubert music), and so forth.

Also, now in Ableton Live 6.0 you could drag from iTunes files directly into the audio tracks. So I did this, works fine.

Now, some issues with this. You can’t directly get the .asd files (have not tried to place those inside the original location), with the autowarping, it didn’t seem to find any .asd warp changes. So it’s like doing an auto-warp each and every time, and any tuned .asd files are not used. Ack.

Secondly, if you want to use .als clip collections, which I think it’s the way I will use Ableton from now, that’s not doable, either.

Also, you need a lot of screen estate to have  both Ableton Live and iTunes running, at the same time.

That’s really sad, as iTunes has excellent capabilities for sorting and arranging song sets, including playlists and global searches, so that part can’t be used for this kind of workflow operations.

Next in our search for the audio content Nirvana we are looking at AudioFinder. You could read about the specs and so on at the IcedAudio web site.

I suspect there are other similar applications, been a while since I looked for similar appliations, though. The principle is simple, find audio resources, and manipulate them: copy to a known folder, filter, convert, chop, and so on.

It’s a good idea. However, in my specific case, I just feel that it is too much for a basic idea of quickly finding material from alternate browsing environments such as the Finder or Ableton Live.

So I would pay money for maybe 70% of the features I would never use — for example in the case of non-destructive editing with Ableton Live would not at all like to edit the original files. Most of my audio needs are also down to the level of .aiff files (and some occasional WAV file from beatport.com). Similarly, I preview from inside Ableton Live (or Logic), so there’s no need to do previewing outside these programs.

Anyway, I must applaud the software engineer(s) behind AudioFinder, it is a very nice program.

Next we will actually look at the intriguing possibilities of using Spotlight meta data…

When someone starts to think about organizing music and sample collections, on the Macintosh platform of course, the first thing that comes to mind is iTunes.

It is free, has tons of features, and you could do all kinds of tricks with the application. Here’s a list of pros and cons that I could think of just now when I’m evaluating this product.

PROS

• You could store most kinds of audio files, drag-and-drop and it’s done.
• You could convert audio to any other needed format easily.
• You could also drag out audio files by drag-and-drop.
• You could edit MP3 and AAC meta information, the mp3 tags, and so on. This even includes Apple lossless, WAV, and AIFF files, but this information is then not stored in the actual audio file itself (wish it was stored as Spotlight information…).
• You could make playlists with all kinds of variations for quick grouping.
• You could do searches across all the audio files, and find based on even esoteric things such as BPM.

CONS

• The audio files are placed in one single folder location, this needs to be around. In other words, you can’t have multiple directories with audio material. Also, having the same file across multiple directories, especially big uncompressed audio files, could quickly eat up disk space.
• If you move the data from a desktop to a laptop, most likely you need to re-generate the playlists and other settings as those don’t easily move between locations. It is also true if you move around the audio files.
• It’s easy to get mixed up with personal audio files and work files. This could be fixed by having a separate MacOSX account for work and pleasure, but it’s easy to forget this

So, iTunes is very close, but there are some drawbacks associated with this solution. I think my biggest gripe is the issue of moving between a desktop and laptop environment, and keep it all synchronized which is a problem.

As most musicians and DJs, I’ve collected music, audio material, on my computers, or set of computers over time.

I started looking at the current collection, spread over an iTunes archive that has mutated over the years, and a folder with AIFF/WAV files for DJ and remixing purposes.

What a mess…

So I need to fix this, and put in place something that will scale long term. I was thinking about documenting the steps, and what I’me learning along the way, so if someone else is doing something similar in future, they might have more ideas.

The utopian goal is this: I could quickly find any snippet or piece of music I need for any purposes, remixing, loop use, DJ use, or for just plain listening purposes, this by just typing in a couple of search criteria. In addition, I would like to find music based on: style, BPM, mood, artist.

This system should work across my studio setup and a laptop configuration, and also be useable from either Ableton Live or Logic, and iTunes, too. So let’s see what we will end up with! I’m even prepared to write custom Cocoa applications to get to this utopian state.

Well, it was the original IBM Deskstar 60Gb disk that was part of the PowerMac system I got over four years ago.

It’s always good to have backups, and most of my material is really stored outside my computer.

I just reinstalled Logic/Live and all the plugins, and some other tools I usually like using. I got an ATI/133 Matrox 100Gb disk from Frys for $59, so that’s a decent price. I don’t want to spend so much money on HW on this system, as I really want to move to the Mac Intel side as soon as possible.

Anyway, always keep your tools on a separate set of CDs or DVDs, with the registration codes included, as well as any of your favorite patches. When you reinstall you save a lot of time if you are organized (and I’m barely organized, myself).

Just to test out the systems I did a quick Film music snippet, Unternet.

As for email, I use gmail quite a lot, everything’s there, and the other accounts I use are all IMAP accounts, all stored outside my world, so I didn’t lose any emails.