I make beats with Cubase. I’m not interested in producing full songs, but I like the process of making loops. It’s my hobby instead of watching Netflix. Having said this, I have a lot of little projects with names like “Boom Boom Beat”, “Untitled” and “Untitled 01”. It’s a total mess. And whenever I open an old project (let’s say from a year ago), some plugin or sample is gone and I cannot listen to what I did back in the days.
So how do you preserve (and organise) your projects? Do you always export all the stems as WAVE-files? Do you give your projects proper names? Any tips are welcome to improve my messiness.
Create New Folder → Name: Jam 18-10-2023 (switch numbers around so that the date makes sense in your region)
If you have another idea later in the day
Create New Project.
Create New Folder → Name: Jam 2 18-10-2023
etc. etc…
In more detail.
If you drag audio files (loops) into your project, these get copied to the Audio folder that exists inside your main project folder. So, if you keep the habit of doing something like what I suggest above, you will never be without your audio files for any project. (unless you just copy it to another computer without the Audio folder.)
Now, with plug-ins, it’s a little more complicated. I never uninstall plug-ins. I just leave them be. But if you uninstall plug-ins, it is expected that right before pressing the button you should think “hey, do I have any projects that use this?” and do a quick export or render of the tracks that use it. (and those wave files should end up in the Audio folder of the project so that we never lose it, see above!)
But that’s just what I do, and I’m just a hobbyist, like you.
I like this kind of threads! They start out with a simple honest question, and then people come over and post their preferred methods, and in the end we get a goldmine of tips, tricks, and workflow goodness.
I second naming Projects after dates when you don’t start off with a proper name like a song title. I have a Folder called “Unnamed Sketches” and then under that each Project has its own unique Folder named mm-dd-yy as is the Project file in the Folder. If one of these sketches evolves into something deserving a proper title I’ll use Backup Project… to create a new & newly named Project. When I do this I always include a note in the date named version like: “this became blah blah blah”
That said, I’d guess songs with lyrics are easier to name than stand alone beats. I think a key to getting it organized would be to come up with some sort of naming scheme that makes sense to you and lets you group them in meaningful ways.
Do you use a single Project to make multiple beats or is it only one per Project?
In regards to dates: I always use the format yyyy-mm-dd, e.g. 2023-12-31.
This way files or folders will be sorted by date in the Explorer/Finder even if sorting is set to alphabetical.
As @raino, I use the backup project function to put them into a better named folder and only the used audio goes in so it’s all self-contained.
And yes, i’ll usually audio export when closing as it takes next to no time to do - if you become a little more pro-active today, it helps you in future as the more you do it the more second nature/easy it becomes.
My default export location is to a Mixdown folder on dropbox, and in there is a ‘Scratch’ folder where oddities go. Got 100’s of odd little loops and ideas and as they’re ideas I just pop them out as 256k mp3.
The upside being that If i’m out, or have some time to kill i’ll listen to them at random via the dropbox account on my phone, and often something jumps out to me.
Trouble is, I find it very hard to go back and build on existing projects, i’m always wanting to jump on to something new. But it does interest me how some projects have a great sound and others don’t.
It’s concerning when your older stuff sounds better too lol.
Bounce all the tracks out. That way no matter what, just import your tracks line them up at bar 1, there’s your project good as new. And no missing plugins because you’ve committed them just like we did when we used tape.