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Comment by breckinloggins | Hacker News Reader

This feels like the kind of workflow that would fit me. My problem, though, is the "reviewing material I've already put away" part. I feel like I'm hoarding stuff rather than saving material for reuse.

Any advice on how to get out of that rut? I'm thinking I just need to introduce a "review" phase where I habitually go through previous stuff.

Oh... in the middle of typing this I realized a big stumbler for me!

I don't bounce my work in progress from DAW projects to audio, so there's just no avoiding opening each individual project in my DAW, waiting for it to load, hoping all the synths and samples are still installed, etc.

I think I've just convinced myself why I should have a bounced version of everything I do in a "parallel folder" so I can quickly preview stuff and only open the actual project when I want to use it.

Anyway thanks for the music production rubber duck debugging session!

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I’m a producer/composer and I cannot recommend enough bouncing as you make iterations. It really helps get used to the music out of the context of the DAW. I’ve found it one of the key improvements I’ve made to my flow. I store everything in Dropbox so when I’m on my work laptop, say, I can go to the various bounce folders in each project folder (use Ableton and yeah, save WIP bounces with the project) and just listen to the tracks as they are. It’s super revealing.

I really feel this. I run a small studio working on my own music and music for friends. The review cycles, listening and modifying is really important for me, incremental progress and all that. I’ve been working on bespoke software to smooth out the process. Audiopile.cloud if you’re interested.

>I don't bounce my work in progress from DAW projects to audio, so there's just no avoiding opening each individual project in my DAW, waiting for it to load, hoping all the synths and samples are still installed, etc.

This is a good thing to do. But another thing to try is also bouncing tracks to audio early within the same project (on another track). This basically means you "commit" to a version of them, and you work with what you got, instead of infinitely tweaking them as MIDI and playing with the VST all the time...

> I think I've just convinced myself why I should have a bounced version of everything I do in a "parallel folder" so I can quickly preview stuff and only open the actual project when I want to use it.

Huh. That would be a wicked feature for a DAW to have built in. Like how photoshop generates thumbnails of the complex document within.

I think I know why they don't, and that's because some songs take a while to render, but I think it would be possible for the 98% of actual usage. I'm not sure at which point you would generate them, on save I guess? Maybe it can be like videogames, where auto-saves are frequent and don't process the preview audio, but a "full save" could contain the full preview clip.

I'm working on a tool to help automate and enforce this bounce often and library curation workflow.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NwpPNCwI5Ic

Should work with any DAW on Windows or macOS. Anyone want try it out with their DAW email me: andrew@dabounce.app

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