smazur wrote:Consolidating audio files in a manner like cjc166 describes (and which Steve contends no one does) is mandated as proper practice according to this paper.
Never even heard of the document, never talked to anybody about it, and came up with that same system myself just by thinking. That's the thing that needs to happen, is people need to think about what sort of things they might expect to happen in the future, and how to accomodate those possibilities.
smazur wrote:You have to be very organized and methodical FROM THE START, otherwise you'll waste hours doing clean-up at the end of the session (or, more likely, not do it at all).
Yep. Organization is key with all things digital. Something I've been doing for a few/several years now is to always start filenames with a 6-digit number in the format YYMMDD, so today would be 080626. That way, your recording session called "080626_PicturesOfYerMom" already tells you exactly what day it was recorded just by you looking at the name. Works great for mixes, too. With the Chrome Robes stuff we're doing right now, we've messed around with adding a suffix after the filename if there are multiple mixes generated in a day that we'd like to compare against each other on outside systems. So 080626_ChickenButt_S and 080626_ChickenButt_B would indicate whether it was my mix or Ben's mix of the song Chicken Butt (which will totally be on our forthcoming album).
Something else I'd recommend in the digital domain, even though it's not required by modern systems, is to NEVER EVER use a blank space in a folder name or a filename. Always use the underscore. Same goes for web addresses, basically anything. Both Windows and Mac accomodate the space character. Watch what it does when you upload it to your website. Fucking %20 or whatever it is that it adds in there. Just don't do it.
Good habits are really easy to form and maintain. Takes almost no effort. Resisting doing it is a really stupid waste of time that increases the chances of problems down the road. But most people don't seem to think much about problems down the road, or how to take actions now that can easily eliminate the possibility of them happening.
With digital, it's pretty simple. Always keep at least two copies of anything important, and keep them on different media. One on DVD, one on hard disk. One on hard disk, one on flash disk. Whatever it is.
An idea ebeam and I were shooting the shit about one day was to take a slab of metal and etch the stream of 0's and 1's into it. If it's a non-corrosive metal that has a pretty stable structure and all that, it seems like a great way to preserve a song for the longest time possible, certainly longer than any disc or tape format. Might even survive fires, if they weren't hot enough to liquefy the metal. And it should be a piece of cake at any point in the future to read that information in optically with some sort of computer scanning type thingy. As long as humans stay at a point where we're not living in some kinda post-apocalyptic Max Max world, that seems like pretty much the most durable audio storage format I can think of.
ebeam works in nanotech, too, so the piece of metal could be really fucking small. I don't know the exact dimensions or nothing, but maybe you could burn a song into a piece of metal the size of a guitar pick or something. I forget what he said in that regard. But you could probably fit an entire album's worth of multitrack wav data onto a piece of metal smaller than a 12" record. That could be pretty cool.
