If you are a digital neat freak who likes nice, orderly, sensical (yeah, I just used "sensical" as a word, deal with it) filing systems where everything is easy to find and understand, this probably isn't going to be a fun experience for you.
Where do I even begin with this one? I guess I'll just start with a screenshot just to give you an idea of what I mean, then I'll start digging deeper through the mess to show you what I have to deal with. And just for the sake of brevity, I'm going to limit this post to my REAPER Media folder and some of it's subfolders, but just know that this is just the tip of the convoluted iceberg.
I don't normally use this folder layout but I want to show you as much of each folder as possible, just to cut down on the amount of images I need to share. Oh, and if you want to see things in more detail just open the image in a new tab.
Right, so first things first, most of the loose files (anything that's not in a folder) here are from last year because at a certain point I realised that it was eventually going to be a nightmare trying to find the files I wanted, so I decided it would be a good idea to start making folders for specific projects. But, as you'll soon find out, that didn't help solve the problem at all...
And honestly, the problem doesn't really stem from a lack of organisation, that's just one of the symptoms. The real problem is my inability to come up with project names to help with organisation. And speaking of project names, let's just go through some of my favorites from this list. But first, notice the files with a bunch of zeros at the start? Yeah, that means I wanted to make those files easier to find, it's my version of organisation.
Anyway, here are a few of the awful names that jump out at me from this first list:
- 0000itsathing - [I'm not sure it is a thing to be honest, it's just a boring drum loop with nothing going for it]
- 000guitarchordnewsongfuckaround001 - [There isn't actually any guitar in this one, it's just a chord progression that I don't even remember how to play on guitar]
- 00blah - [This is actually a pretty nice four chord progression that kind of reminds me of some of the music Tyler, the Creator makes]
- 001sillydrumz1.1_ifyouwanttodomoreusethisonedummy - [Because I know how unorganised I am, it might be one of my better tracks too]
- uttershite - [This title is just accurate]
Alright, that's enough from that folder, time for another screenshot (or two).
So, this is the shite folder which includes the bitsandbobs folder.
First, let's deal with bitsandbobs. Notice there is only two project files in that folder, but there's four different songs? Yeah, that's a problem. It's a nightmare for me to try and find the original projects if I want to expand on any of those tracks. I guess past me just really doesn't like future me (present me?) because he does this kind of shit all the time, he really likes to make things difficult.
Ok, back to shite for a second. Other than 354s and idunno, I kind of like the names of these files, although it doesn't help me understand what's inside them at all. I think deepshite and moarshite are my favorites, the tracks are shite though, although deepshite is not without it's merits.
Now that we start digging through the folders we see that the mess is reduced, but things are still unorganised mainly due to the names. For example:
I mean, how am I supposed to know what dumdrumdumb and 000 are? And if you were to click into the stupidfast folder, the only track you will find is named dumdum, which isn't even really all that fast, it's only 80BPM.
And if you want to see something that looks like a real nightmare but is actually fairly reasonable, check this out:
That's my ipod recordings folder where I dump all my @junkyjeff recordings and other acoustic experiments. Luckily I don't spend much time trying to look for files in their because I usually copy the important ones to a separate project folder as soon as I dump them.
Oh, and just before I wrap this shitpost up, I just want you to know that it does get worse:
But that nightmare can wait.
Anyway, I'm done, I just wanted to share with you guys a little piece of the hell I have to live with on a daily basis. I might upload some of the tracks mentioned here to dsound or dtube over the next couple of days if you're interested to hear them.
Oh, and hey, let me know, do you suffer from these problems too or is it just me? Am I a bad person?