Best practice for archiving a song

[soundofdrums]

I've spent quite a lot of time over the past few days and, in summary, exporting all stems using the channel option seems the best way of "archiving" the tracks so that if a plugin or instrument fails in the future you'll still be able to re-mix or remaster the track. So, in effect, what @FMN-Music has in his video although just doing that step is good enough for me.

The other option that I would have liked to explore more is to do a "mixdown selection" on each and every track because if you then played all the resulting tracks without any routing you would get exactly your mix (minus any of the Main Out plugins). I'm not exactly sure where that would be useful but it would be nice to have that option. Unfortunately, though, I couldn't find a way to make a macro which would automatically do this to every track in a song. Maybe there is but I couldn't get anything to work.

And, before anybody suggests it, exporting stems with the track option doesn't achieve it.

As a total aside, no rendering option nulled, especially in the 1k+ frequency range which is making me wonder whether I need to test the rendering processing although maybe that's just to be expected.

I’ve been trying to figure that out myself for a long time. As far as I can see it’s not possible to automate which is a shame. Andrew Scheps has a plugin for PT that allows any possible configurations of exports to be batch processed. It’d be such a time saver to have something like that for S1/SP. There’s a company called Forte that make a similar plugin for pro tools and logic. I reached out to them to see if they could port it to S1 but they didn’t seem particularly interested. I remember mentioning it to @Lukas a while ago cos if anyone can make that for us, Lukas is the man!

 

[jfran2]

And, before anybody suggests it, exporting stems with the track option doesn't achieve it.

I'm probably missing something here, but according to Gregor's video here

To view this content we will need your consent to set third party cookies.
For more detailed information, see our cookies page.

Accept third party cookies

it seems like exporting stems with the Channel option should do what you're looking for. Would that work? I would think that if you exported two sets of stems - one with inserts and one without, you should have all the information you would need to rebuild or modify a song later on.

 

[darren]

@jfran2, yup, like I said in the post above, export stems channels is definitely the way to go. Additionally, on another thread I point out that it's the only render which seems to be 100% accurate although the key advantage is that if you tick every single channel (tracks, buses, fx) then you can rebuild with quite a lot of flexibility.

As long as you still have the Studio One song to show you the routing and panning.

 

[Ken Morgan]

One factor is inconsistency in terminology. Some of us Jurassic types aren't really familiar with terms like stems - we called them subgroups or auxes. Archiving means something different to many different people.

From an old school perspective archiving (as nicely explained above) is generally used to describe the process of preparing a session for storage with no plans for future use. To many its the idea of a box of 2" tape with a notebook detailing what was used to get there (track sheets, what mics/console/dynamic and other unique effects, etc, all annotated as to give a concise explanation of what it is and how it was done.

For my purposes, private and for hire, I have several drives (all converted to SSD now) each with artist name or in personal use things, songs...each song will have a folder. Each folder will have a subfolder, one containing JUST the audio files used in the final mix, one subfolder will have only the most recent DAW session, and one subfolder will contain things like lyric sheets, pertinent correspondence with the artist, emails, photos of hardware settings, that sort of thing.

Disclaimer: I didn't start this until 2009 or so, and some things are (probably for the best) long gone

 

[SwitchBack]

That's it, isn't it? Music platforms like Spotify are full of 'remix' and remastered' versions of classic songs. Which means that someone found the box with the tapes and the notes and decided to have at it with the new tools at our disposal. It also indicates that to some extent it's acceptable that a re-release isn't exactly the same as the original. So maybe just save the tracks, make notes about the bus processing (or take pictures), and allow yourself some wiggle room should you have to revisit the song