How do you store your samples, song files, mp3s etc?

[Dave Elyzium]

My hard drive is littered with unfinished songs, samples and MP3's all over the place...
do you guys have a good structured filing system or is it a mess like mine??
should I partition my hard rive into seperate drives for samples, mp3s and so on??
any good advice??

[RichieV]

definitely partion your hardrive

I have 2 hardrives and i seperate them into 6 partitions

1: windows
2: music applications
3: regular applications
4: sample library
5: samples being used now
6: junk ( file sharing stuff, stuff i don't really care about )

[EmotionComplex]

i have 2 20 gig drives in my main pc, c: is used to install all my programss etc, and the second drive i use for samples,audio etc whcih is sorted into folders, like to keep my pc mega clean

[Barely Human]

i have 2 20 gig drives in my main pc, c: is used to install all my programss etc, and the second drive i use for samples,audio etc whcih is sorted into folders, like to keep my pc mega clean

Thats the way i keep mine pretty much. My c: drive has all the progs on it and i stick all my samps, mps, song files and temp on my D: . All my downloads go directly on my d: drive and then i sort them l8tr. I also deffrag my hdd's every night to keep them running nice and fast.

[Jimfish]

err yeah you gotta be structured - it helps the computer and the creative process..

on my studio pc i have an 80gb drive running windows/programs
then i have 2 120gb removable drives - one for audio (samples, sond files, hard disk recording etc) & the other just for storing junk

on the audio drive i have a loops folder & a samples folder
within them everything is neatly categorised

also i then have a cubase folder and everytime i start a track i make a dated folder to keep it in - i also make sure i copy any samples used into the directory so its easy for me to give to remixers etc...

you need some kinda structure like this, it took me a few days to arrange and i spend a few hours here and there keeping it sweet, but it really does save sooo much time later on

[Basil Rush]

1 drive for samples (now at 15gig somehow...)
contains a folder called 'samples' and a folder called 'original-libraries' and i move stuff into categories from 'original-libraries' to subfolders of samples like 'samples/drum-hits/hihats/closed-loose/hat13.wav' or whatever

system drive contains the software

then there are a couple of huge drives containing all the projects and related audio each project has its own folder containing everything it needs to playback successfully (including bounces of all synths and outboard effects used) and usually a collection of mp3 bounces. each session is saved with several version numbers in case i need to go back to an older idea. usually the project folder gets moved to a 'completed-projects' directory when we are done with it for the time being.

finally there is a folder called 'completed-tracks' containing the most up to date 16 bit 44.1k aif of each project for putting onto CD's or whatever.

and that's that...

[alpha_unit]

mine is a 40 gig mess, soon looking to rectify the situation when i can be arsed

[The Divide]

Mine was a 60 gig mess. Took me about 2 days to sort it out too. I wish I did this from the start tho, Having every kick drum sample in a kick drum folder sounds like common sense, bits soo dam easy to drag and drop a drum kit folder full of all kindsa of samples and not realy have a sound where you exepect it to be.

If I was you i would stop everything and take some time out to do just that.

Put everything where you expect it to be when you come back. Then when you on with a project and you think this needs a ...

hey presto you know where to look and your working faster.

[John Vella]

Man....... :?

Mine is kind of a mess.

I better get on this soon b4 it gets too late!

-jOHNNY

[The Divide]

May the force be with you....