With all my wisdom, I have used up too much space on my 30 Gig hard drive

originalrocker wrote on 7/4/2002, 11:49 AM
I have had vegas recording software for about a year. The problem is, learning to use the program I did not clear the edit history or delete old files/old takes that I no longer use on my finished songs. I'm a musician not a computer wiz. How would I delete old unused wav files without deleting my finished audio files? Please answer in computer for dummies terms. Thanks for your time!!
Bill

Comments

Rednroll wrote on 7/4/2002, 12:26 PM
Do you own a CDR? I'm hoping you do. You need to clear up some space on your HD, about 500 meg or so. Create a folder and name if after the song or something you can easily identify if with. Now open the Vegas project and go to the "media pool". Use the "Broom" tool to "remove all unused media from from the media pool". This removes all the takes you recorded and decided not to use in the Vegas project. Now save that Vegas project to the new folder you created and make sure "copy all media with project" is checked. This will save all the wave files along with all the edits of the project file to one folder (the new one you created) on your hard drive. Exit out of Vegas. Open up your favorite CDrom burning software and back up that folder which you just created onto a CDROM...not an audio CD. Once you did this now DELETE the new folder your created. Now open up the Project on the CDROM you created. Everything should be there. You need to do these steps to every song you've ever created. What you are doing is ARCHIVING everything to CDroms, which cost about 50 cents for 700megs of storage. Once you finish these steps and are sure everything is backed up to CDroms, now you can go back and DELETE All the audio files off of your hard drive and recover most of your 30 gigs. If you want to work on an old song, then just drag and drop the folder from your CDrom to your hard drive and open up the .VEG file on your hard drive and you're ready to add any additional audio takes.

This is a process you should have been doing all along, to avoid the problems you're having now. So this will probably take some time to do all at once now.

Good luck,
Rednroll
originalrocker wrote on 7/4/2002, 4:02 PM
Thanks Rednroll, I do have a CD writer, this helps a bunch!
Chienworks wrote on 7/4/2002, 6:20 PM
One quick note to beware of ... usually when dragging files from a CD back to the hard drive, they will have ReadOnly set in their properties. If you need to change any of the files you've brought back from CD, either save them to new names, or right-mouse-button click on the files in explorer first, go to Properties, uncheck ReadOnly, and Apply. You can do this step to multiple files at once.
originalrocker wrote on 7/4/2002, 10:47 PM
Thanks Chienworks Simple computer things like that would stump me.
Caruso wrote on 7/9/2002, 5:53 AM
Rednroll:
An excellent post. I would amend it slightly toward the cautious side. You write:
"Open up your favorite CDrom burning software and back up that folder which you just created onto a CDROM...not an audio CD. Once you did this now DELETE the new folder your created. Now open up the Project on the CDROM you created. Everything should be there."

I would suggest opening the project from the newly created CDROM before deleting that temporary folder to confirm that the burn was successful before deleting the folder . . . easier to reburn if the folder isn't deleted (I concede that most current winOS's allow restoration of the deleted folder if it is needed, but I still think it makes good sense to confirm archival success before deleting the source (temp) folder).

Except for that very minor point, I commend you (not that you need my commendation) on a well written post.

Caruso
Caruso wrote on 7/9/2002, 5:59 AM
One more thing:
If you are certain you will never have to make use of those media files again (ie, if the final version of your audio file is really final), you can simply copy that (or render it again) to any available storage space, and delete everything else. This, naturally, saves the most space, but, of course, all you wind up with is that final file.

But, I generally find that, unless I know I'll be producing final distrubution copies that have regular points of variation for some reason (ie, in video, perhaps, titles that change depending upon the target viewing audience), my final file is the one I am most satisfied with, so that I'll never have a reason to go back and rework the project.

I'd be curious to know how often and under what circumstances those of you who save the media files regularly make use of them?

Thanks.

Caruso
Rednroll wrote on 7/9/2002, 12:22 PM
In music type of work I rarely go back to the original elements, except when someone decides they want to do a remix(ie dance remix) and being able to grab each individual track is priceless.

When doing radio/Tv commercial work this is a necessity, because even when you think you're done with a spot, a year later someone comes in and wants to grab the end tag line off the spot or they need to change 1 word because some executive didn't like it back at the office. There is daily changes doing this kind of work and you need to keep everything....even the takes you didn't use on the final spot.
drbam wrote on 7/9/2002, 2:57 PM
I typically archive everything to removable drives except initial takes or other files that clearly won't be of any use. . . ever. Storage is quite affordable now, so its easier to not get into deciding what stays or goes. Of course its extremely important to organize all media in a logical manner. ;-)

drbam
larryo wrote on 7/12/2002, 7:11 PM
I currently do not have software to burn data. My setup is this: PC, Vegas 2.0, Sound Forge 4.0xp & 5.0, CD Architect and a microboards burner that came bundled with CDA. I've retained SF 4.0XP to keep CDA alive along with my burner.

Any recommendations as to what software would be suitable to store these data files, and if my vintage microboards playwrite would even work as a data burner?? LarryO

Geoff_Wood wrote on 7/15/2002, 6:12 PM
I now make a point of first setting the properties for each *song* to an individual folder, rather than per individual artist or project. This makes archival to CD much more straightforward.