A full day of computer admin, after deciding on a new filing system for albums. Filing is, I think, very important. A good system can really make creativity easy, and not being organised in how things are arranged or stored can stop creativity. An empty bookshelf, for example, makes you want to add books. A messy shelf will making losing books easier.
Today I've gone though my albums and started to delete the raw recordings used. The parts that are used are already stored in the sequencer files, so those can be saved out at any time anyway, but many albums have a lot of extra bits: outtakes, raw recordings, unused sections. I've tended to keep these too, but today I've deleted most of them.
For my instrumental music this was hardly an issue. Nothing was recorded live, so hardly any unique samples were used. I didn't keep backups of Tor's Gunstorm lyrics, and I didn't keep the vocal recordings for Cycles & Shadows, but when I started to record songs, with the experimental Harlequin Kings album in 2015, I started to keep everything, partly because Prometheus back then couldn't save out samples, so if I needed to edit or change anything I had to edit the sample externally and reload it. Secondly, I found myself doing several takes for the first time, so when the album was done, I simply deleted the unused takes and kept the used ones.
The Myth of Sisyphus, released this year, was my first album to feature a lot of instrument recordings as well as vocals, mainly guitar, and this increased with Nightfood, with live synth, and moreso with the new album which has some kazoo, harmonica and other oddities, so I've started to amass quite a lot of source recordings by now, over 500Mb, per album.
So after considering filing options, I've decided to list what files were used for each album, a list of the filenames, but delete most of the recordings. I'll keep special ones; alternative takes which might have future cultural or personal interest, full edits which were edited for the album, and other things which I generally like of love but aren't in the final music for some reason; but generally about 95%, perhaps 4Gb, of data has been deleted today from 13 albums.
4Gb is quite a lot, but the size isn't important; it's the philosophy of what to keep. Optimal efficiency is always my key principle. Those source recordings are a bit like training wheels. I don't need them, so it's confidence-boosting to delete them, and it evens up the playing field with unpublished songs, like the ones I made for ArtSwarm, that don't have any such storage. So, I can now feel free to create music and use my recordings folders as scaffolding to be deleted when the final music is complete.
Well, this has taken all day.
I also sent out a newsletter email about the Macc Art Lounge exhibition, which opens on Saturday. I have a double-opt-in mailing list, from an email address you can reply to me from, and always have unsubscribe and update links, so was annoyed today when 'Crewe Nub News' automatically signed me up to a mailing list without my consent, from a donotreply address, without an unsubscribe option. Each of these things is illegal under GDPR regulations.
In other news I've received some exciting double density floppy discs to try in my synth. God bless friends with older PC hardware!
