I've recently started to cut up acapellas/instrumentals for use in AM and I will be using these cutups to create mashups (much like Girl Talk). I was wandering if anyone here has any good methods to organize files for this type of tuse. My desktop is getting full and I would like to have an efficient way to organize and keep tidy my sound files for AM. Any help or guidance would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
SK
Oh and also I was thinking about getting an external harddrive to keep all my files on for my notebook, your thoughts? :)
Folders - organised by sample type (breaks/bass/vox etc) and then maybe subfolders with key or tempo banding?
I have a rediculous file tree just for snare drums!
External hardisk FTW - Also, BACK UP BACK UP BACK UP your work (it was worth saying three times). You gotta do this double-as-much if you're working solely from an exernal.
As they say in IT depts; it doesn't exist unless it's backed up three times in separate places.
This issue has been on my mind, too. Electronic musicians working with samples and loops and tracks must create a boatload of files, and keeping them organized must quickly become a challenge.
For the Mac, there used to be programs designed specifically for managing fonts - of which many graphics designers had a similar boatload. (Now, Apple builds this function into OS X.) I wonder if there are analogous programs for music-making. I will look around, but if anyone has any pointers .....
You might like iced audio's audiofinder. It's one of the only reasonably priced tools to organize audio. Personally, I just use metadata on all my files. I use automator actions for osx. I hear windows 7 is much improved in the way it handles metadata.
I also make an effort not to stockpile sounds and delete things right away if they aren't working, but since disk space is so cheap I usually back most things up on an external drive and occasionally go through them when I'd bored or something.
I will ck out Audiofinder. And using metadata has occurred to me. I wonder if there'd be a way to have AM help with this, to provide a set of fields - or even our own choice of fields - for adding our own tags when we Export to Sound files, for instance.
Where and when and how, Jonah, do you add metadata? One could use the file name, I suppose, or the Spotlight comment field. Am I missing something in OS X? Quite likely.
For other kinds of files, by the way, I use a v. nifty program called Yojimbo - a sort of collect-all for text and image files. They are organizable into folders and categories and taggable as you please, making them all v. searchable. Doesn't handle sound files, however.
I posted this elsewhere, might as well cross post it here too.
Quicksilver, automator action to append metadata comments to multiple files, tagbag. I like snapper2 a bit better than audiofinder for quickly chunking out audio files, but audiofinder does a lot. NameChanger. Smart folders, automator actions to add metadata to files automatically when they get sorted into a smart folder.
You might like the program default folder x. I'm demoing it now. I have a hard time spending money on "productivity" software.
Thanks for the info and advice, Jonah. I had not heard of any of those programs, but they all look quite interesting. Automator's one of those things I have never seen a use for or bothered to master - nor AppleScript, for that matter.
One could, I suppose make all of one's AM files in the same key and with the same BPM, just to make them inter-useful. (My son, 12, on piano, just got a "fake book" with all songs in C. What?!)
John