[SteveFireland]

Luckily my session was a quick demo track I was knocking out for a drummer friend so I only lost 5 or 6 hours of work - if it had been one of the tracks from the album I'm recording right now I would have been shafted!

We all know about making manual backups (which I do religiously!) but in this instance losing the 4 or so hours work I'd done on second day of the session was the majority of the finished song... I had the working backups from the first hour or two I'd done on the first day, but the auto-backups from the second day all had the same problem.

And because it was a lot of midi, with just a couple of tracks of chopped up guitar parts it pretty much easier to start over than try to import audio files and re-jig them around - especially as I didn't know what were good takes etc.


Is there a spec somewhere for the session files? Surely there are programmers (like myself) who could have a go at debugging this sort of thing themselves?

One useful application I had thought of, if we could read the session files ourselves, would be to select one session file, and apply the settings (vol, pan, sends, inserts, routing) of it's tracks to similarly named tracks in other sessions. I'm sure we've all hit the problem of mixing one track of an album and realsing there's 14 other tracks we need to go and replicate the basic setting across.

With a 9 or 10 piece kit, bass, a dozen guitar tracks, couple of lead vox, background vox - it can take half an hour to accurately (if you can!) replicate the basic mix onto one other session. How handy would it be to apply the same setting across all those sessions with one click?

Unless there's some other smart way of doing this that I don't know about yet - that doesn't involve recording the whole album in one session - which I concede there might well be!


/rant
Steve.