What have I been busy with since my last blog post? MUCH time has been spent on file management. It would seem that writing songs, recording, posting, etc would be the bulk of the work that we undertook the past couple of years. Actually, managing the files that make up each song turned out to be a way bigger task then we ever thought. Each song is made up of multiple files - and multiple versions of those files. A song can be anywhere between a couple hundred meg up to 6GB, depending on number of tracks, takes, edits and so on.
Recently we archived all the files from The Song Of The Day project. The entire archive, including the videos, is close to 450GB. Over the past two years, we copied files to external drives to transport them back and forth between studios, resulting in multiple versions of many songs spread out between PCs and external drives. Reconciling these things to be sure we archived the latest version (in case we need it in the future) has taken HOURS. Given the amount of work that went into each song, we're in mortal fear of pressing the delete key - even if we're 99.999% sure that what we're deleting has been archived somewhere. So what do we do? We buy lots of 500GB external drives and keep lots of copies of our files in different locations. We're partial to the Western Digital My Book Essential 500GB drives. We've found it's best to stick with one model/brand so we have multiple cables and power adapters that we can leave in each studio and not have to carry them around. It seems we've evolved our file management system pretty well, but the work continues on...
What else have I been busy with? Oh yeah - that little project to produce an album entirely in February - our RPM Challenge album, Sham Rock. More files to manage...
