Keeping Project Folders Organized in REAPER

hi I'm Kenny Choi welcome to another one of my tutorials in this video I'm gonna show you how to keep project folders organized in Reaper now if you like me you like to keep your projects very organized it'll make it easy to find them and find the version you want to use so luckily it's not that hard to do in Reaper but let me show you but first I want to mention if you're ever in a situation we want to back up the project you're working on I have a project in front of me here with a drum loop a piano and a synth and I'm not sure the audio is on my hard drive the easiest thing to do is to save as so go to the file menu right up here and choose save project as then you want to find where you want to save it I'm going to save it to a folder go Reba projects give it a name and very important go down here and check the checkbox create sub directory for project and also this one here copy all media into project directory that's going to copy everything in your project or the audio media whatever into one folder the folder we're creating right here called save project one so let's see that it creates a folder right here with all the media and everything else we need what's open it up we have our audio files right here I'm a drum loop my piano and my synth but you also notice there's some peak files one for each and that can make a folder very cluttered or messy the peak files being what we're seeing right here reaper creates these files so we can see what our waveforms look like those are the peak files so the first thing I'd recommend is changing a preference for our peak files let's go to the preferences in the options menu right down here let's go down to media there's an option right over here which will put our peak files in a peak subfolder if you're dealing with a lot of audio files this is really helpful because it get very cluttered in this folder if we have a lot of audio files and their peak files so we want to put these in separate folders to make them neater let's go back to our preferences and we'll choose the option right here and we'll save it and now if we say the project is going to create a folder for the peek files save project as again we're gonna save it choosing these two options with these two checkboxes but save it as project two to see if the folder looks neater here's the project we just saved and it's a little bit neater we have a reaper project file right here our audio right here and then a folder called peaks with all the peak files right in there and if you don't want the peak files in each folder you could choose a different option instead put a paths over here and choose the option over here to store all peak files in a separate path you can create the path right here by browsing then all your peak files will be in a separate folder and not your project folder but I personally prefer to keep them all organized in the project folder so I'm gonna make sure we choose the option right here to put new peak files in a Peaks subfolder but if we have a lot of audio files this folder can still get very messy but they had a few more a recording to this vocal tract you can see very quickly this folder can get very cluttered with a lot of files so it recommend is going to project settings in Reaper go to the file menu and choose project settings and go over here to media and type in the name of a folder which will be a subfolder where we can store the audio files or a media files on name in audio or audio files or media hit ok and now if we save this save project as we'll save it as project 3 hit the checkboxes I forgot a project three it looks like this with the reaper project file by itself and an audio folder if we open the audio folder or the audio or media files are in here with a separate folder just for the peaks keeping the whole thing a lot more organized but everything is still here so if we want to back this up to a separate hard drive we just back up this folder this folder right here but we could still make it a bit neater one thing we don't notice here is there's no backup files created yet we'll start to see those if we keep saving this what's it safe see right here here's the new main file and here's the backup file it's gonna automatically create a backup file every time hit safe and it's gonna replace the previous one so if I keep hitting save it's gonna replace the previous one and save the old one to the backup file here's the new one and here's the backup file with a previous file that we previously saved but sometimes you want to keep more backup files let's go back to the preferences if we go down over here to project over here we could adjust how we saved backup files by default these two are on so it's gonna overwrite the previous backup file and create a new backup which is what I just showed you but many times we want to keep more of those backup files just to be safe if we choose the option here timestamp backup every time we hit save and reaper it's gonna create a new file here and it's gonna timestamp it see right here every time I hit save it creates a new backup file that's time-stamped so once again this folder is getting messy so what I recommend instead instead of choosing this option choose this option over here keep multiple versions it'll still keep multiple backups but we'll put them all in one file let me show you but save as again who named this project for open this one up again it looks nice and neat with the audio and some folder the peek files in their own folder and just the project file neatly out here and now if I hit save and Reaper it creates that backup file just like before but watch what happens if I save many times if you look at the file size for the backup it keeps getting bigger 64 72 so it's creating backups inside this file if you want to see them just double click it we can see the timestamp for each one of them just choose the one you want to refer to and load that one but they're all nice and neat in this one uncoated file so a project folder is a lot easier or simpler to navigate but this is only affecting what happens when we hit save manually but there's also autosave let's go back to our preferences and down over here is where we can choose autosave by default set to 15 minutes let's change it to 1 minute just so we can see the results a lot quicker we could save to a timestamp file in the project directory which again is gonna be messy so instead let's choose the option here save the timestamp file in an additional directory we can keep it relative to our project so it's type over here auto backup that's going to create a folder just for the auto backup project files let's hit OK and notice what happened you create another folder right here for the auto backup rajat file our backup for manual saves and auto backup for the automatic backup files which is gonna save based on our preference which is set to one minute right now so it's gonna create a new backup file every minute whatever you set this preference to so the auto backup files will wind up in this one folder keeping this entire project folder a lot neater and that's cluttered as these files and these files were all much deeper in the sub directory I should mention one other thing everything we've done so far in the preferences is going to stay that way from project to project the ones over here for our saving and down over here from media and our PEAC files but the project settings are based on project so they're gonna be different on every project unless we change this one setting let's go to our project settings right here if we go to media he's the folder we created for our audio or immediate if you want this folder in every project just go down over here and choose save as default project settings and then every new project you create will have that folder make a new project tab it should already be there for those project settings just like that so it's automatically gonna create the audio folder here and the auto backup folder keeping the project folder less cluttered and more organized so that's pretty much it that's keeping project folders organized in Reaper I hope you learn something I hope you can use it and I'll see you next time Thanks [Music] you ah you

Channel: REAPER Mania

Views: 52,505

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Id: pjey57lAp1k

Length: 10min 55sec (655 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 27 2018