Hanging day at the Macc Art Lounge today, but the job was more of a very much hands-off role of helping with general curating, no actual hanging took place.
In music work, I'm considering filing methods. For the Gunstorm E.P. and The End and The Beginning, I didn't file any recordings, because Tor's vocals were sent to me on a disc, so I had those, and I only retained what I used - but I kept the audio CD he sent me. For more recent song albums, I started to keep everything, all vocals used, but delete unused takes. Now I have vocals, and lots of live music recordings, extended guitar parts for example, of which I only use a part. What do I keep? Is it valuable to keep everything? Is it valuable to keep anything?
The samples I actually use can be saved out from my software, so those can be accessed. In the past I've kept long samples (1:35 or more) because these are split in the software, but even those are identical when I save them out and chain them end to end. My previous albums have all of the vocals and clips saved, but I'm now erring towards deleting them all. These amount to 100-200Mb per album, a large amount, but irrespective of size it also seems inefficient to keep them.
My principle idea is simple: keep any unique recordings, used or unused, which might have a future use or future historical or cultural value (eg. unused alternative takes); delete everything else. Efficiency here can have an impact on future production. If Frank Zappa kept all of his out-takes (he probably did), it would be a vast library, but one so monstrous to manage that it would sap time best used to create, as well as expensive to store.
