Project backup guide for Tracktion with lossless compression

[metamorphosis]

Because tracktion's lossless export function doesn't really work (crashes on 88khz, doesn't compress 32-bit, sometimes just doesn't work etc), thought I would share my process for backing up tracktion projects -
This requires (a) you have wavpack installed (flac doesn't support 32-bit floating point audio), (b) you have the Wavpack frontend.

1. Create backup folder with name of project.
2. Create subfolders 'masters' and 'tracktion project'.
3. Use tracktion to export-copy ("Export as files in a directory") the project to the 'tracktion project' directory (this should copy and consolidate all of the external .wav/loop files as well).
4. Copy your finished masters to the 'masters' directory.
5. In explorer, right-click the backup folder and go 'search'. Do a search for *.wav.
6. Drag all the .wav files found into the wavpack frontend. Encode all on highest compression and make sure 'delete source' is ticked. This has an additional advantage in that wavpack will tell you if any of your files are corrupted or not valid .wav files.
7. Copy your backup folder to wherever you backup stuff.

Looks complicated, isn't really. Course, if you don't care about lossless compression you can just do a export-copy and be done with it. But wavpack compression gives you per-file CRC-encoding which allows you to identify files which have corrupted later on - whereas a .wav will just turn into white noise or develop a few glitches if it's corrupted. And your project size drops by 60%, which can be useful for backing to DVD or whatever.

[mr]

Thks

[skipkent]

Good to know. Thanks!