How do you organize your projects?

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I'm using Reaper and I'm recording/producing as a hobby, meaning I have no clients or deadlines. With my day job, I can organize projects based on clients, or on a very specific project with a scope, contract and objectives. With my music, the project could do in any direction.

For this reason, I have a hard time knowing how to organize projects. I used to have them organized in folders based on style or genre, but your song can change as you're producing it, and end up in a different category.

Then I started organizing them based on completion. So songs with a structure and multiple tracks laid down would go in one folder, projects that were just a looped hook with a beat would go in another. But, of course, as you work more on a project, it would then belong in a different folder.

So basically I have all these half completed songs and scraps of ideas in a 'projects' folder and I'm wondering if you have any recommendations for workflow, and how to keep these things organized.

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My project folder reads like a journal, a private diary. Every host has a master folder and years usually get new ones when they start. Every few months I create a new subfolder with a timestamp in the name and perhaps some descriptive sentence about my life at the moment. Then each project starts with a timestamp (ie. 0207 for today), the track title usually is something I've been thinking about, whatever it is that inspires me to make the tune, and then at the end of the project name I usually have the tempo and the chords.


I've found it quite a good way, been doing it for years. I can plough through my folders and remember what was going on in my life, reminisce the meditations -- and with the tempo there I can pretty easily guess what type of thing it's going to be even if I don't recall it otherwise, and with the chords there I can just start jamming with it without looking deeper into it.

Everything stays in the order I created them and it allows for simple version control. Projects in which I've bounced everything in, that are ready for mixdown, I start with a _ character so that they're at the top of the folder.

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I think you might be overthinking about organization. I don't even organize my music like that (but then I basically only listen to metal so I just put all my music in folder named "Metal" by artists).

I am a mixing/mastering engineer and I do work with clients and deal with deadlines. However, I never really organize my projects, except that every project has it's own master fold that has everything in it. Maybe it's because I only mix metal and if I were to categorize them there would only be a folder named "metal" anyways. I never really encounter any problem finding the project folders though, simply because how much time I have to spend on each project. Perhaps I should start grouping the albums I have finished into folders...

I also tend to give my projects casual or stupid names...here's a little part of my "Reaper Projects" folder:

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Like others I just keep each song in progress in it's own folder, audio files, notes, graphics for the project all go in that folder too. I don't usually let songs linger too long uncompleted, so having too many never really is an issue for me.

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My projects are organized like this:

Completed Projects
2016
2015
2014 etc

In Progress Projects
2016
2015
2014 etc

Masters
2016
2015 etc

Reaper is great for organizing projects like in this way, because it copies every audio file belonging to a project into it own folder.

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Hope you have clicked at reaper that button when saving "save to a new folder" and also that "copy samples to folder" so you don't clutter your work folder.

And I organize in a very simple way.
Psy 1 E phrygian
Psy 2 Am
Electro 1 Em

etc etc.

Then finished songs are in a folder called "finished" :D I've named them of course and they have more info than just "psy 1".

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