How do you personally save/organize your songs and plugins?

[rewer]

Do you keep all the plugins used in your project?
Do you only keep the bounced tracks (and the effect plugs)?
How many plugins have you used in all your projects and have you kept them all?
What about older projects with a different DAW?

I'd love to hear your input on this matter!

[jancivil]

For the most part, I render the final product from a project with the MIDI->soft instruments active. I do certain things w. synths that are too wild (long envelopes or delay/echo/verb) to remain feasible how I work, which is the cursor returns to start. So I render those. Once I'm confident of that, I unload those instruments. OR, there are results which vary playback to playback so much I'll render a more or less ideal take of a part by trial-and-error. I don't typically have to bounce just because of performance of the system, a luxury provided pretty much thru using VE Pro. Where there is this render-and-be-done m.o. I save the projects with names to indicate that.

[harryupbabble]

I save all the freeware plugins that I accumulate... to DVD. Same with all my Reaper projects. I save everything. If I have to move to another dwelling or city, I could sell and throw my belongings but I would keep the plugins and the projects.

Might be cheaper to upload the plugins to a free cloud storage instead of saving them to DVDs, but it seems that that would be a slower way to access them compared to DVD access.

Holey moley!!! I just did a Agent Ransack search of my PC drive's "VSTPlugins" folders using the search word ".dll" and it returned a result of 10,420. Some plugins may have multiple .dll files and some could be duplicates so the total number of VST plugins may be less than 10,420. I think I've only used about 50 of those roughly 10,000 VST plugins since I spend more time playing speed scrabble than making music. Speaking of which... I'm off to play speed scrabble. Ciao.

[rewer]

For the most part, I render the final product from a project with the MIDI->soft instruments active. I do certain things w. synths that are too wild (long envelopes or delay/echo/verb) to remain feasible how I work, which is the cursor returns to start. So I render those. Once I'm confident of that, I unload those instruments. OR, there are results which vary playback to playback so much I'll render a more or less ideal take of a part by trial-and-error. I don't typically have to bounce just because of performance of the system, a luxury provided pretty much thru using VE Pro. Where there is this render-and-be-done m.o. I save the projects with names to indicate that.

It's not a matter of performance for me either. The reason why I don't bounce the tracks and keep the plugs is editability even though I rarely actually revisit my older projects. I mean, what if you want to edit something later on but find yourself having rendered that part and unloading the instruments doesn't really make it easier does it?

[rewer]

I save all the freeware plugins that I accumulate... to DVD. Same with all my Reaper projects. I save everything. If I have to move to another dwelling or city, I could sell and throw my belongings but I would keep the plugins and the projects.

Might be cheaper to upload the plugins to a free cloud storage instead of saving them to DVDs, but it seems that that would be a slower way to access them compared to DVD access.

Holey moley!!! I just did a Agent Ransack search of my PC drive's "VSTPlugins" folders using the search word ".dll" and it returned a result of 10,420. Some plugins may have multiple .dll files and some could be duplicates so the total number of VST plugins may be less than 10,420. I think I've only used about 50 of those roughly 10,000 VST plugins since I spend more time playing speed scrabble than making music. Speaking of which... I'm off to play speed scrabble. Ciao.

Wow, just... wow! I haven't even demoed so many plugins yet. I sometimes save the dlls along with the project file of the song I've used them in cause I know I won't be using them again or in any other track. I guess one has to compromise between keeping it simple and small thereby keeping track of everything and opening oneself to a vast palette of tools and instruments sacrificing overview.

[jancivil]

It's not a matter of performance for me either. The reason why I don't bounce the tracks and keep the plugs is editability even though I rarely actually revisit my older projects. I mean, what if you want to edit something later on but find yourself having rendered that part and unloading the instruments doesn't really make it easier does it?

Yeah, I keep the 'pre-render' projects just in case. I do a fair amount of 'just in case'. In terms of organization vs squalor there is a point where I save as back-up, which in Cubase saves to a fresh folder and here I indicate 'remove unused media'. So I now know exactly what audio is deletable. I create a lot of audio somehow.

But the vsti situation is I'll have 3 or 4 connections to VE Pro server and sometimes 1 or 2 instances of Reaktor and rarely more. So the real instrument (and FX) load is on that end; so the optics are more sensible than in Cubase. and 'decoupled' means a much more efficient (and stable) load, saves are much faster, etc.

[jancivil]

My Components (AU) folder here shows 64 items. I've used most of them.

[NystagmusE]

Do you keep all the plugins used in your project?
Do you only keep the bounced tracks (and the effect plugs)?
How many plugins have you used in all your projects and have you kept them all?
What about older projects with a different DAW?

I'd love to hear your input on this matter!

Yes I keep all the plugins I've used in my VSTplugins folder.
I dont keep my project stems though after i'm done making a tune.
I just keep the finished tunes.

I currently have 99 plugins total and I've used almost all of them at one time or another.
I don't throw away plugins just because I've used them in a tune.

I do use different DAWs sometimes, but I point all DAWs to the same VSTplugins folder.
For organization, I use the built-in folder system of Reaper.
Outside of Reaper, I just put each plugin and it's data into it's own folder inside of the VSTplugins folder.
That makes it easier to delete plugins that I don't want anymore.