Logic Pro 8 File Management

[pfloyd714714]

I'm sure there's an "obvious" solution to this problem, but I haven't run across it yet. Please feel free to chime in.

Let's say I have a track called "RthmGuit1." I play over this track ten times. Take ten is a keeper. At the end of my session, I wish to delete takes 1-9. If I go to the audio bin and choose "Select Unused" and then attempt to delete them, I am told that these tracks are used in fourteen (or some such number) other projects. This is because I have other projects with tracks called RthmGuit1." (Like "Bass," some of these pesky instruments crop up in project after project.) What to do? I'm petrified that if I go ahead and delete them anyway, numerous seemingly unrelated projects will inform me that "Audio File X cannot be found." So, I waste untold minutes going into the Audio Bin, selecting the unused files, and individually renaming them "a," "b," "c," "d," etc., knowing that no other project has files with these names. Then I can safely delete them. One easy solution would be to name each track with a title unique to the song's title. So if I'm working on a song called "Homeward Bound," I could call the bass track "Homeward Bass." Then it would be easy to delete the unused takes since no other project would have files with that title. This may be impractical, though, since the space for the track title at the bottom of each channel strip in the Mixer is quite small. "Homeward Bass" could be truncated to something like "Homew".

On a similar note, what is the difference between choosing "Select Unused" and deleting via the Audio File menu and the "Clean Up" command under the File menu? They seem to perform similar functions.

I've been using Logic since version 6, so I have some familiarity with the program. Prior to sending this post I looked around for an answer to this question but haven't been able to find one. I'm no pro--just an amateur musician who does this for fun. Please, please help me stop wasting my precious time renaming audio files "a," "b," "c," "d,".....

Sorry for the long post. I figured that by providing more detail I'd only have to ask once.

Jim

 

[zerobeat]

Since Logic still doesn't support more than 31 characters for audio filenames, it's impractical to be very verbose in their naming. My strategy is to put the initials of the song (maybe just first two letters) in the filename. And sometimes I'll put a dot or a comma. The point is that I vastly reduce the possibility that there could exist on my hard drive(s) at the same time two files with the same name but that belong to different songs. So even if I have Bass.YW and Bass,YW (that come from different songs), Logic won't mistake them because of the dot versus comma.

If you START with this strategy (determine a unique filename before recording begins), then you avoid any future grief.

When tracking is finished, I'll usually rename the tracks and channelstrips (not the audiofiles!) to something less verbose so it's cleaner looking and easier to find stuff in the Arrange and Mixer.


ProTools has an excellent method: Every audiofile has a unique 14-character identifier (like a serial number) imbedded inside the file, that is tied to the Session (similar to Logic's "Project"). So even if there are two files called "Geetar" from different sessions, the unique identifier would prevent them from being mistaken for each other as far as ProTools is concerned.

 

[peterlemer]

I do as zerobeat does - I use a few characters from the song name at the start of the filename.

pete