Folder organization ideas?

[Nachei]

My home recording folder has been a jungle for a long time, and I'm looking for some ideas and suggestions that I can steal for organization.

The thing that flabbergasts me the most is the huge amount of variables in play, i.e. possibilities of organization. If you have a dubstep project and also a polka band, it makes sense to create one different folder for each, that much seems clear, but beyond that, the possibilities explode:

-Folders for published songs vs wip (being currently worked in at the moment) vs songs left halfway through for some reason (abandoned or waiting for their hour - I have hundreds of them)

-Folder with all song materials together (session files, final products, art, marketing copy, lyric videos...) vs having a "sessions" folder and then another with "finished products". These "products" folder could also be specialized into "finished songs" (final .oggs or .wavs that you can grab and make a quick playlist with), and "finished videos" (if you make a lyric or regular video for a song)...

-Chronological ordering: it would be nice if the system gave you some idea of chronology, e.g. folders by years... As an alternative, this kind of info, I guess, can be registered using a spreadsheet, but that's a drag to maintain...

-And besides your main b(r)ands, how do you store other session files like a track you did in a collaboration site like Wikiloops, that little jingle you made for a non-music related YouTube video, that podcast you tried to do and followed through for 3-4 chapters?

With so many parameters, it's easy to have a tree of folders that takes you 5 levels before you reach the actual content. How do you deal with this mess, what has worked for you?

[Nachei]

Wot, no ideas?
Then I guess your folders are just as much of a mess as mine... or maybe you have found the ultimate organization system and you keep it hush hush...

[sysrqer]

Mine is:

├── Ableton
├── Atlas
├── BespokeSynth
├── Bitwig-Studio
├── Music Stuff
├── My Full Songs
├── Presets & Banks
├── Projects
├── Renoise
├── Samples
└── VCV Rack

Projects are organised by program:

├── Ardour
├── Audiostellar
├── BespokeSynth
├── Bitwig Studio
├── Cardinal
├── Carla Racks
├── Hydrogen
├── PaulStretch
├── Pd
├── qsampler
├── Qtractor Projects
├── reaper linux
├── renoise
├── Sunvox
└── VCV Rack

Samples:

├── Bass
├── Clocks
├── Drums
├── EmissionControl
├── Field Recordings
├── Flute
├── Fucking around
├── FX
├── Guitar
├── Hang Drum
├── Indian Folk
├── MIDI Clips⁄Grooves
├── Misc Sounds
├── Multisamples
├── My Made Samples
├── Prayer_Bowls
├── Sample Packs
├── Song Loops
├── Strings
├── Synths
├── Vocal & Talking
├── Wavetables
└── Wind

I reorganised recently so I'm quite happy with this set up.

[bhilmers]

On my Data partition I have the following folder and sub-folders (approximately):

Code: Select all

Audio
|-Captures
|-Drums
  |-Kits
  |-Sounds
|-MIDI
|-Plugins
  |-LV2
  |-VST
|-Samples
|-SoudFonts
  |-GM
  |-Other

This is my library where I keep anything that is not a current project. All my current projects go on the Desktop while I'm working on them, which often involve multiple applications. When the project is completed I store it in either my personal projects folder or folder I have for client work.

One thing I am very diligent about doing is keeping production notes. At every stage of a project I have a plain text file where I record important dates and milestones, music keys and ASCII tabs, hardware settings, software settings, and occasionally tags. This way I can grep for specific information if I need it later.

EDIT: I forgot to mention, I have a specific folder for incomplete music names "Ideas." I write detailed notes about each thing I put in there and remarkably I actually use some of this stuff once in a while.

[Nachei]

Thank you so much for sharing.
@Sysrqer, you blew my mind... In my first post I made a random list of possible way of organizing projects... But never in a million years I would have included organizing them by program! The possibilities keep coming and coming! I don't really get the advantage of organizing things that way, I mean, it seems more intuitive to me to have a folder for song x, with everything x-related, notwithstanding the program(s) used... in my case this means a lot of reaper files, but if I have old recordings from ardour, audacity, hydrogen or what have you, they go altogether... But of course you'll probably won't be as "scattered" as me, maybe you choose one single program for a project and stick to it, which makes more sense...

I am also going to take a lot of the categories from your /samples folder, adapting it... (e.g., I don't do much "fucking around", at least not in that area )

@bhilmers, thank you too... I tried using the desktop for active projects, but I tend to be too scattered and I end up having lots of projects not really finished - but I'll get to it - but I never really do etc. I like the idea of taking notes, until now I've only used very basic notes (a couple of lines for tonality, BPM etc), but I see the great advantage of logging a little so that you can later use the power of grep... Particularly, I like the suggestion of writing notes for the unfinished projects, I think it can help me greatly to tame the disorder, so thank you again...

[scott.thomason]

Mine is:

├── Ableton
├── Atlas
├── BespokeSynth
├── Bitwig-Studio
├── Music Stuff
├── My Full Songs
├── Presets & Banks
├── Projects
├── Renoise
├── Samples
└── VCV Rack

Projects are organised by program:

├── Ardour
├── Audiostellar
├── BespokeSynth
├── Bitwig Studio
├── Cardinal
├── Carla Racks
├── Hydrogen
├── PaulStretch
├── Pd
├── qsampler
├── Qtractor Projects
├── reaper linux
├── renoise
├── Sunvox
└── VCV Rack

Samples:

├── Bass
├── Clocks
├── Drums
├── EmissionControl
├── Field Recordings
├── Flute
├── Fucking around
├── FX
├── Guitar
├── Hang Drum
├── Indian Folk
├── MIDI Clips⁄Grooves
├── Misc Sounds
├── Multisamples
├── My Made Samples
├── Prayer_Bowls
├── Sample Packs
├── Song Loops
├── Strings
├── Synths
├── Vocal & Talking
├── Wavetables
└── Wind

I reorganised recently so I'm quite happy with this set up.

What, no "random shit" folder?!

[sysrqer]

Thank you so much for sharing.
@Sysrqer, you blew my mind... In my first post I made a random list of possible way of organizing projects... But never in a million years I would have included organizing them by program! The possibilities keep coming and coming! I don't really get the advantage of organizing things that way, I mean, it seems more intuitive to me to have a folder for song x, with everything x-related, notwithstanding the program(s) used... in my case this means a lot of reaper files, but if I have old recordings from ardour, audacity, hydrogen or what have you, they go altogether... But of course you'll probably won't be as "scattered" as me, maybe you choose one single program for a project and stick to it, which makes more sense...

I generally don't work in multiple daws for a project so it makes sense for me. There are some exceptions to this, like I will work on something in VCV Rack and then record it and then process the stems in Reaper or Bitwig but at that point I don't need to access the VCV Rack project again so there's not much point in having the project file in the same folder as the Reaper project.

Also, I usually open a project from within the program so it makes more sense to me to navigate to the daw's projects folder rather than trying to hunt down a project file in a bunch of folders which may or may not have a project file in them.

Once a track is done, I collect all and save so all external samples are in the project. I backup the whole drive regularly so I generally don't need to catch everything in one place. But I can see that if you have a more modular approach then having everything stored in one folder makes a lot of sense.

A lot of my directory structure is built using symlinks. For example, the top level Bitwig-Studio is Bitwig's library which includes projects so they are actually stored there. However, I like to have all projects for all daws/hosts in one place so I have symlinked Bitwig's project folder in the library to the main Projects folder.

I am also going to take a lot of the categories from your /samples folder, adapting it... (e.g., I don't do much "fucking around", at least not in that area )

What, no "random shit" folder?!

Haha my random shit is the Fucking around directory really, just weird sounds that I might process later at some point. It's actually a bit redundant. And the Music Stuff is pretty much anything that doesn't fit anywhere else. My Projects directories are full of crap projects though!

[Nachei]

Very interesting stuff. I've tried to use symlinks in the past for organization too, but they tend to break on me, I've researched why but I never get it. Sometimes a symlink via graphic file manager doesn't work, then I create it using ln -s and it does work, but next time I use it appears broken. I guess the matter is also complicated for the fact that I use the same computer for audio and non-audio stuff, with two different distros...

For my audio projects I took as initial basis the standards by the Grammy academy; in a nutshell, among other folders, you create a folder songname_MST for the main project, and other folders songname_comment_SLV when needed (i.e. submix of something, or you sent the song for someone else to sing or play a solo on it...) I thought it would be a good idea to copy the pros, but maybe this system is from the CD era and has become obsolete, because I've tried to check the resource to share it here, and surprise, the link is broken...