Archiving, making stems, etc… What do you do when you're done?

[angopop]

Once you’ve finished working on a song, how do you archive the session?

I’ve just wrapped up about twenty songs, and when I thought about just backing up the PTools sesssions, I thought about old songs of mine that I’ve occasionally wanted to remix/update, but found that I had to start from scratch as I did not own the plug-ins anymore, or did not save the session info well.  So I started to think about the best way to archive/back up going forward.

I started creating two backups: one which is just the stems of each instrument (drums, bass, rhythm gtrs, lead gtrs, piano, strings, etc… all printed through the auxes with their effects).  Play them all back in sync and there’s my mix.

I also create a second back-up where I consolidate tracks and/or print with effects so that I can at least play back the tracks with whatever eq, etc I used on the tracks themselves, but they are still going through the auxes, and if I don’t have the plugs I use on the auxes years later, I’ll have to start from a scratch again, but not as much.

I could get completely crazy and note the settings of any plug-ins on the auxes of this last method, but I’m still figuring this out.

What do other people do?

[woodsdenis]

You are doing the right thing, pita but you will thank yourself down the line.

[Art Munson]

I save it all! The project files, DAW, plugins, backups AND the computer created on. I started in 2005 and can go back to just about everything (a couple of things have disappeared). Currently I dual boot Win XP and Win 7 (separate OS drives). Getting ready for a new computer and will dual boot that but will save my current one until I get it all transferred.

[Author]

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