Mike Shupp

The organization of any project is essential, and it’s especially important for the file management of a music recording session using a modern DAW (digital audio workstation). Here are some thoughts and examples from my current organization philosophy, which is modified and personalized from the technical guidelines at The Recording Academy’s P&E Wing.

I have a general, top-level folder structure already in place, and then use a Windows batch file (or shell script on Mac) to auto-create the bulk of the project-specific folder hierarchy I want, and then create the DAW session within the appropriate folder.

File and folder naming conventions are the key principle in maintaining clarity, consistency, and portability across recording sessions. The guidance for allowable characters for file naming is to use only ASCII letters, digits, underscores, and hyphens—and nothing else. No spaces, special characters or other punctuation. This is intended to support long-term archival readability, accurate searching and tracking across distribution systems, and overall file safety, compatibility, and standardization.