wanted to purge some samples and get rid of some plugs that I never use (freeware and stuff I bought). then I realized that I have hundreds of songs and song ideas that I did over the last few years and that I never bounced the individual tracks down to audio. everything is tied to whatever effects and plugs I used. I want to get a new computer soon and have a slimmer collection of samples/plugs; leaving the laborious task of going through everything and bouncing to audio each individual track. aargh.

has anyone else made this mistake? or something even dumber?

haha.. your not alone mate, i'm dumb as well.

i managed to delete a partition with all song ideas and finished projects from a whole year. since then i save always with a backup.

back to your story: i usually bounce every midi down to audio before pre. its simply to have enough resources while "mastering" and avoid any glitches that may occur. theres simply no reason not to bounce the individual tracks down to audio when you are finished anyway.

I've lost so many songs this way. Hundreds and hundreds. Common issue.

I mean, I could parse through all the individual tracks and try to recreate every effect chain somehow but at that point it's like not even worth it to me.

holy crap, that is pretty intense. one can only imagine the look on your face.

yeah, it's retarded not to manage stuff while doing it. i just started a few years ago, so I have learned as I go along. i can deal with the poor recording techniques that I notice after the fact, but the house keeping stuff is torture once you figure out how wrong you are.



never happen. I will probably go through the tracks that are worth saving and forget about the rest. keep telling myself that maybe its a good thing. half of them were recorded when I was really terrible at what I do, so it's not as if I could do any damage to the stuff (unless they're based around a sample).

I have [kinda] resolved it like this: I have a "projects" folder, and in this folder I put only tracks done with almost no plugins in them, no production in a sense, and I have a folder full of tracks that are done with all kinds of plugins. Now these tracks can come useful, but it's not 100% that I can recreate them.

It is a problem, yes. Using too many different plugins. One should stick with one set of plugins and that's it. Riiiight...

Oh, regarding VSTis, I use mostly samplers, and only a handful of VSTis, so I don't have problems with "where's that VSTi". I use only few VSTis. That's my advantage. I cannot imagine the confusion of using a 100 of VSTis on top of 100s of VSTs. Good heavens!

Just now I got this idea... to backup the VST folder along with the tracks when I'm doing a backup. Not a bad idea. It also makes everything much easier if you're using a lot of freeware [but good] plugins, so you don't have to authorise them, and similar [cowshit].

oh, to answer the OT: don't worry, I've seen much worse. And I would absolutely agree with rendering your tracks to WAVs or AIFs then backing them up. There's no safer way! There's also one thing I found out about this - you essentially create your own sample bank of loops and sounds that way. It can come in handy for inspiration, or just sell them as a sample bank if they're good.

Cheers!

Have a couple of tracks that use PowerPC plugs, and I didn't bounce them when I upgraded to an Intel Mac. Oh well. In one important case at least I have a decent master of it.

It happens. There are worse things in life.

Victor.

yeah well maybe not that SPECIFIC mistake, but believe me I have had my moments.

When things like this happen to me from time to time, I look at it as an opportunity to creatively start from scratch, get rid of the stagnant ideas that never seemed to go anywhere, and create fresh new inspiration. /end cheeze

haha. keep waiting for the punch line.



plenty of those floating around. i think that is the best tactic. I have millions of cassette tapes with songs on them from back in the day, and there is no way I will go through those and mine the good ideas. if they were worth keeping, they wouldn't have been on cassettes in the first place.

when I started I wanted to stay in control so I kept everything in midi. That is great for creating music but not for managing 100s of ideas or mixing or finishing. I stayed in the midi-world way to long before I realised I would better bounce lots of my ideas down to wave and start mixing and finishing my tracks. I won't call it dumb, just a view on music production which needed a shift.

Same hold for effect chains, just bounce it instead of trying to recreate it in the final mix project. Else you will never finish a track.

I'm way dumber than you am.