Friday, April 22, 2011

Spring Cleaning

I'm not one of those Reason users that has hundreds of refills crammed into my computer's hard drive. As I've mentioned here a few times, I tend to use my own patches and sounds when I can, so I have just a couple of commercial refills, a couple of select mini-refills from guys like Stompp and Peff, and of course a handful of Propellerheads Software refills.

I will, however, admit that I have a weakness for drum samples. If you post a set of quality samples from an old, somewhat obscure drum machine, you can bet good money that I've downloaded it and filed it away with all of the other drum machine samples I searched out. The problem is, as much as I enjoy testing out the samples when I download them, I rarely go back to them. There's nothing wrong with them, of course, they're almost always excellent quality and have intriguing sonic character, but I'm a creature of habit and tend to reach for the "usual suspects," regardless of whatever else I have stored away somewhere. So, while I've managed to be very careful and judicious about the refills I put on my laptop's hard drive, I have literally thousands of Wav files collecting digital dust in my documents folder.

The problem is compounded a little bit by this blog. As I've mentioned before, I file my patches by category, with every patch I've created stored in one of them, such as Pad, Bass, Synth, Percussion, Loops, and so on. In addition to these ever-swelling folders, I also have a copy of my Reason Patch A Day Archive Refill, Vol 1 taking up space, and duplicating literally hundreds of files.

Each file is only a few KBs, of course, but it doesn't take long for those KBs to add up and I feel like I'm suffering from a little digital bloat (don't even get me started on my iTunes music and TV show files).

So, this weekend, I'm going to pare things down a little. My goal is, by Monday, to have a lean, clean hard drive, with a svelte backup file copied over to another disc, and maybe even a burnt DVD or two to give me a redundant backup of the important stuff.

What about you? Interested in doing a little spring cleaning of your own? How often do you go through your files and weed out the unnecessary stuff?

Expect an instrument patch tonight. I overslept and didn't have a chance to put one together this morning.

3 comments:

Hydlide said...

my stuff has turned into an utter mess here. But to add, it had something to do with reinstalling a complete computer. I had to move files (backup) from one location to multiple locations. So it got scattered around.

Currently I have an external drive where I am 're-ordering' all my files on to.

Problem is, it isn't just patches. Its more RNS files that seems to be my biggest mess over here ;)

Ruurd K Huizenga said...

It is good to use spring as excuse for cleaning up. My advise is do it always by making it systematic.
Or better learn to use your gear so good that you need no prefab sounds or refills. There are some witch are verry good Robb or Hydlide, so continue to upload them. Have a good Eastern!

Patch-A-Day Robbneu said...

Thanks for the input, Hydlide and bodhisvaha. It's been a time consuming project, but already feels pretty good.