Doug, your last post made me laugh out loud! lolz!

eliya wrote:Steve, how many times did you revise the sessions you've worked on? I'm not being cynical, i'm totally serious, how many times did you have to go and dig up some multitrack tapes and put them on the machine? What was the gap between when the session was conducted to when you revised it?
I don't know, maybe it's fairly common that people ask the engineer who recorded them to go and revise the session 10 years after it's ended.

I've done it a bunch with tapes 20 years old and older. Both for old sessions of mine and for file tapes of other people. I've certainly done it enough to know that making it possible is an obligation of mine. I listen to a lot of music that was recorded before last year, and I'd like people in the future to have that option as well.

As for making things permanent being a sign of pretension, fuck off. It isn't being done just for the sake of the band (though this is their life's work we're talking about), but for anybody in the future who might take an interest. That's why it's called "recording." We are creating the historical record.

otisroom wrote:What do you do with the session files that are created at electrical on your devil machine?

Whoever is responsible for the session does whatever he wants with it. I'm certainly not going to assume responsibility for a session for all eternity.

I run ProTools at my studio and struggled for a long time on the appropriate way to "archive" the work being done. I have now standardized what I feel is the most responsible way to back-up the audio done during the session.

For the instrument tracks>>
1)All the tracks are numbered and labeled for easy recall into any session. e.g. 01_KICK 02_SNARE. You do this at the beginning of the session.
2)After the session is done, all tracks are consolidated "made whole .wav files for non ProTools users" with all the start times being zero.
3)All unused takes are removed, and all unnecessary audio is removed from the session playlist.
4)Create a new folder with the song name
5)Save a copy of the cleaned up ProTools session in that new folder. This will save all the work on the ProTools File, as well as create a folder with only the whole .wav tracks. That way if ProTools does work in the future, you can still use the session data, and if it does not, it is very simple to upload the .wav tracks into any program and know what they are.

The audio folder contents would look something like this. I'll make it short just to give you the idea.

01_kick.wav
02_snare.wav
03_04_drum_oh.wav
05_bass.wav
06_gtrL.wav
07_gtrR.wav
08_vox.wav

It only takes about 5 minutes when you're done with the song to do all these steps.

So, I'll do this with all the songs, put them on a DVD or two, and give them to the clients, with an insert with all the technical data.

This may not be as functional as tape as far as archival purposes, but it's not bad. The bands I've done this for are extremely appreciative.

If there's some flaw with doing things this way, please let me know, so that I may investigate improving my methods.

cjc166 wrote:I run ProTools at my studio and struggled for a long time on the appropriate way to "archive" the work being done. I have now standardized what I feel is the most responsible way to back-up the audio done during the session.

For the instrument tracks>>
1)All the tracks are numbered and labeled for easy recall into any session. e.g. 01_KICK 02_SNARE. You do this at the beginning of the session.
2)After the session is done, all tracks are consolidated "made whole .wav files for non ProTools users" with all the start times being zero.
3)All unused takes are removed, and all unnecessary audio is removed from the session playlist.
4)Create a new folder with the song name
5)Save a copy of the cleaned up ProTools session in that new folder. This will save all the work on the ProTools File, as well as create a folder with only the whole .wav tracks. That way if ProTools does work in the future, you can still use the session data, and if it does not, it is very simple to upload the .wav tracks into any program and know what they are.

The audio folder contents would look something like this. I'll make it short just to give you the idea.

01_kick.wav
02_snare.wav
03_04_drum_oh.wav
05_bass.wav
06_gtrL.wav
07_gtrR.wav
08_vox.wav

It only takes about 5 minutes when you're done with the song to do all these steps.

So, I'll do this with all the songs, put them on a DVD or two, and give them to the clients, with an insert with all the technical data.

This may not be as functional as tape as far as archival purposes, but it's not bad. The bands I've done this for are extremely appreciative.

If there's some flaw with doing things this way, please let me know, so that I may investigate improving my methods.

I think your method is about as sound as it gets right now.

steve wrote:

scott wrote:

steve wrote:

scott wrote:B) to have every virtual track exported as a single wav, comprised of all the edits/crossfades that may have been enacted on all the punched sections, etc., with leading silence so they all start at the zero mark

Yeah, nobody does this. It would be better, of course, but nobody does it.

The only time (so far) that I've recorded a band and they wanted to have somebody else to the mix, this is what they asked for and what we delivered.

So you did it once.
You realize every one of the couple thousand sessions I have conducted is more durable than that, right? And I didn't have to do anything to make that happen, right? And that you haven't done it for all the other stuff you have recorded and are recording, and yet you expect that someday you'll just spend a couple of months doing it all at once without getting paid to do it because it's become some kind of emergency and oh fuck it who cares about that shit anyway...

Nobody does it as a regular regimen, and nobody will pay to have it done for everything being recorded continuously as we speak.

I do it every time, during the session. It takes a whopping 5 minutes per song, if that. If you do it immediately following mixing, no one even notices because you just say you're giving your ears a rest. Give the client a DVD with the tracks when your done for the day.

If DVDs go out of fashion, fuck it, you tried your best.

cjc166 wrote:If DVDs go out of fashion, fuck it, you tried your best.

I'm going to say about three years.

steve wrote:

cjc166 wrote:If DVDs go out of fashion, fuck it, you tried your best.

I'm going to say about three years.

Then it's up to the client if they wish to pursue transferring the medium or not to keep it current. At least they're afforded that option.

In fact, I'm going to put an article on my website about the benefits of backing up the tracks to tape and refer them to North America's premeire analog facility, to have the trasfer done. I'll leave it in their hands. It's not my decision to make for them. At least they were given the opportunity, and made aware of the issue.

steve wrote:I've done it a bunch with tapes 20 years old and older. Both for old sessions of mine and for file tapes of other people. I've certainly done it enough to know that making it possible is an obligation of mine. I listen to a lot of music that was recorded before last year, and I'd like people in the future to have that option as well.

Are we talking multitrack tapes or stereo masters? Just wondering, because this seems to be an important distinction. Backing up final masters digitally and keeping them in a current format seems almost trivial, but I tend to agree about the multitrack files or protools projects or whatever. However, I just can't imagine a situation where I'd want to go back and remix some old project in 20 years or really care if I couldn't.

cjc166, what you're describing is almost exactly the system I came up with, only I've never provided any documentation of any sort because I'm not a pro, I'm just a guy that records bands (mostly my own). also, we tend to copy the files directly to external hard drives since we don't mess around with DVDs.

maybe DVD drives won't be the standard disc-based storage medium in a few years, but they'll certainly be a format that will be readable by subsequent laser-based disc-based drives for many years to come.

with there being (I'm guessing here) literally *billions* of USB devices out there, at least hundreds of millons, I think it's a safe bet that USB devices will be supported for a long, long time. so the USB hard drive would be my choice if I was sticking something in a vault to not touch for 50 years.