Deleting unused files?

[JFreak]

Originally Posted by CME

Absolutely. The only reason I started cleaning up sessions was when I started mixing my churches services. When you have 20+ channels recording nothing for 30 mins or so while the pastor preaches, you end up with a lot of wasted space. Most services are 20-25 GB when recorded. After cleanup I can usually get them down to 5-7 GB. Much more manageable.

When it comes to tracking songs I don't even think about cleaning them up. Hard drives are cheap enough these days for some wasted space. 20 GB a week is a little much IMO though.

Been there, done that. With 32-48 tracks and +180min total, gig after gig, about a hundred times. Here's a trick that might work for you. If you're recording that speech to cd-r anyway (a big if, but bear with me), you could choose to not record that track to your session to begin with!

So what you want to do is set up an AUX track for the speech mic and route it straight to your master outputs. Then just stop recording once band stops playing and restart when the speech is ending. Depending on your buffers, it makes a small click when you restart, but it's very hard to notice if you have a good timing (find a half a second pause and mute the PA while you restart -- three clicks total, or if you don't care about a small click then just restart and don't care).

Or if there is a good half a minute pause between band coming off and pastor coming in, and vice versa, you could just stop recording, alt-click record enable button to disable all tracks, then click on the speech track, and record only that track while the band is on coffee. Then reverse the setting once band comes in. Nobody notices few clicks if there is noise anyway.

But yeah, those empty tracks keep wasting space. Good for you to get them compacted :)

Janne