Fixing Your Disorganized REAPER Projects

hey guys if you missed the last video on file management this is a follow up and in this video we're talking about fixing file management issues if you've got projects already started that you need to organize and get into my sort of system alright so here we are in finder and this is kind of a I think it's kind of a typical situation where you've got projects saved along with all this kind of media that is disorganized so I've got a lot of wav files here in this repr media folder and I've got a project saved here just as an example I you know I never setup projects like this but if you don't follow the instructions in that file management video you've probably got something similar to this but probably a lot more project files backup files are epeak files all in the same folder disorganised so let's just take this file double-click it to open it and it does load up with some audio files in here so seemingly that is no problem but let's go to the file menu and go to clean current project directory Reaper sees this project as having a ton of files if you selected all and deleted you would actually remove all these files in here that are not contained within this project file so you really don't want to do that so we need to save this as its own project file in a new location this is the simplest way to set this up so we're going to file menu and save project as and in here we're going to choose a new location it should be on your project Drive or just some other location where you can easily find it organize it so maybe you have just a dedicated spot on that hard drive even if it's still in the Documents folder just a folder for projects so let's just rename this file - oh man egde meant to demo and down at the bottom of this window there are a couple options so the first really one here is create subdirectory for project that just means it's going to make a folder like you see here with these other projects there's a folder for each one and it's named the same as the project name and then we're going to copy all media into project directory you can convert it I wouldn't recommend doing that you won't don't want to do anything that would change the sound of your project and then there's move all media into project directory usually you don't want to do that copying is much safer it duplicates things but then you now should absolutely know that you have everything you need so I'm going to copy everything to the project directory and hit save so all these files have been copied new repeat files have been created and if I go to my project 2017 Drive find that demo right here now I've got all the audio files that were used in the project and my RPP this project doesn't have a project media folder so let's go to the project settings again in the file menu file project settings on the media page we're going to type in audio files so if you starter the project without having this set up already you would need to type this in and then continue on to going to the View menu go to project media effects Bay and on the source tab this shows all the items that are in the project and if we expand this window we can see the path for where things are and this can really be helpful to know which files belong in the project where are things used in other places things like that so we can select them all right click go to move slash copy file and we want to move file to project media directory and all that's going to do here is just put it into that folder called audio files I was just going to take a second so now it's inside of the audio files folder if I switch to finder this folder looks a lot more organized and just imagine if you have 60 files hundreds of files having everything inside of a folder called audio files makes things a lot simpler now if we wanted to do that save as thing a little bit differently if we just put in the folder name here in the project settings media call it audio files then do the save as that would save a step we wouldn't have to go into the project media effects Bay and copy those over just when we're doing the save as into a new folder it would do that for us and now if we look into the clean project directory window there's no files in here that are unused I also had a question in the comments of the last video about rendering so when you render a mix where do you put it in the render to file window we're going to set this up so if you keep this blank it's going to use the project directory which means that it will be in here right beside the RPP as you can see from this path here but if you just type in export it's going to automatically create a folder inside of here and we'll just call this mix why not so let's just render the project now we have a folder called export and the first mix you could also leave this blank and just do a slash so sly slash mixes and then call it project and then mix to render it and again it's made a new folder called mixes and there is our named project alright guys so that should wrap it up for file management if you have any questions please let me know in the comments if you miss the previous video please check that out thank you guys so much for watching please subscribe to the channel if you haven't already follow me on Facebook and Twitter support the reaper blogs or patreon and visit reaper blog net for a lot more tutorials [Applause] [Music]

Channel: The REAPER Blog

Views: 9,250

Keywords: the reaper blog, reaperblog, reaper blog, reaper tutorial, jon tidey, cockos reaper, reaperdaw, reaper daw, reaper daw tutorial, project media fx bay, media bay reaper, project folder reaper, reaper (software), organize project reaper, save as, how to find files in reaper, project/media/fx bay

Id: EPQ5bZXoXlQ

Length: 6min 49sec (409 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 25 2019