Making a serious catalog archive for a client

[kslight]

So I’ve got a client with a particularly huge amount of past work, sessions, etc. Some released, but much that is not. I have suggested that it’s in his best interest to get it all organized (currently spread across many external hard drives) and setup with a database. Go through everything and make bounces so can get a feel for what’s really in there. Probably render stems of everything, make some searchable tags?

Where would you start? Any programs you are using for a database? Would use a combination of physical backups and cloud backups of those backups.

[Nick Sevilla]

I did this a few years ago for a client.

A combination of Pro Tools demo sessions, 2" tapes, 1/2" and 1/4" master mix tapes, DATs, DA88s, ADATS, the works.

This is how we got through it:

Made a Master Excel sheet.

Organized the material BEFORE doing any transfers, etc.

Then, created a long term work plan, to do 10-20 hours per week, until it was all done.

Got a scientific drying oven for the tapes (my dad in law had one so I got lucky, but you can find them online as well for cheap)

Then went CHRONOLOGICALLY from the EARLIEST material, to the latest.

Made THREE HARD BACKUPS NOTHING ON THE CLOUD. The Cloud will get expensive and is never a good solution for the long term.

Made TWO HARD DRIVES, and ONE SET OF BLU RAY DISCS. All identical, and all done progressively as we moved through the material. This is, THREE full, independent backup sets. I have one, the client has the other two. I have the Blu Ray discs. He has the hard drives, which he can and has been going through and deciding what, if anything, to remix, finish working on, etc. The EXCEL SHEET is also part of the backups. And hard copies of the excel sheet as well, accompanying each set.

[Nick Sevilla]

Also, we did NOT submix anything, no stems. Just the raw multitracks transferred from tape.

All of it, 24 bits 96 kHz, using the best converters we could get (Mytek) rented them for the project.

[kslight]

Thanks.

I’ve been piecing through different ideas before I make a proposal for what this project should entail.

It’s tough for me to get a handle on the an exact figure of how much data, it really depends on what is included and what is not. On the low end of things probably 10tb+, on the high end could be huge. I really need to get inside it to figure out how big it is, but I know he’s got at least dozens of drives. Some tape that’s up to 20 years old but I’m not even sure he’s thinking about tape yet.

For the amount of data he has I don’t think that blu rays are cost effective/practical. I was thinking more along the lines of some form of NAS device, with redundancy (not striped for speed), plus cloud. The main advantage of cloud would be that he wants to be able to access his data wherever he is. That could be the coasts, or his house, his studio,, or his boat. The other being that it would serve as an offsite backup. But I’m not sure how practical it is or long term cost effectiveness.

[kslight]

I guess I would be curious how a big recording artist like Trent Reznor, Prince, Hans Zimmer, etc handles all their projects...because we know they produce so much more than they’ve ever released.


What sort of fields did you make in your spreadsheet? Did you do any tagging to the sessions as well?

[Nick Sevilla]

I guess I would be curious how a big recording artist like Trent Reznor, Prince, Hans Zimmer, etc handles all their projects...because we know they produce so much more than they’ve ever released.


What sort of fields did you make in your spreadsheet? Did you do any tagging to the sessions as well?

Well this artist, we did mostly transfers to Pro Tools HD, from tapes of different ages / types. ANd some already digitial stuff, just upconverting all to 24bit / 96kHz so everything is uniform.

Fields on my spreadsheet were stuff like:

Original Recording Date / Project Name / Song Name / Number of tracks / Source (tape,ips,dolby etc) / Notes/

I also scanned EVERYTHING, from 2" tape boxes, on all sides, track sheets, notes, etc. This way nothing got lost. All the scans went into each Pro tools folder under a "scans" folder. This way the artist could open up a track sheet, which the audio files matched, and get to work. Also some of it could be cool artwork for any future releases.

Hans Zimmer uses a giant server farm with redundancy on site and an offsite "cloud" backup. It is insanely huge, and added to constantly. I would not be shocked to see 100TB or more in that one LOL.

Cheers and good luck. This will be a long time consuming project, but if you schedule only a few hours per week, you'll not burn out.