The method · assets

One session. Forty things that outlive it.

A recording session produces far more than a song, and almost none of it is organized by the person making it, because that person is busy making it.

Reference songs the client sent. Their phone demo. A live video of the band. Charts. The session file. Raw takes, and the takes nobody chose. Six bounces of one song. A master. Renders for three platforms. Contact sheets. A cost model, an invoice, a signed milestone. Somewhere in there, the one file everything else was made from.

Every working engineer has touched all of it. Almost none of us has ever organized it correctly, and the cost is not untidiness. It is the ten minutes spent looking while a client waits, and what the client concludes during those ten minutes.

The sorting question

Not “where does this go”. What happens if it is lost.

Folder names are an opinion. One question is not, and its answer decides everything downstream — what is protected, what is thrown away and rebuilt, and what a milestone is allowed to close over.

Source

Losing it loses the work. No recipe reproduces it — the room and the performance are gone. Raw takes, session files, every mix instance, the master, the camera original.

Derivative

Losing it costs compute, provided the recipe survived. Renders, delivery formats, contact sheets, consolidated multitracks — rebuildable, but only if what made them was written down.

Record

An assertion about another asset: a measurement, a signed milestone, a credit roster. Worthless if it cannot name its subject exactly.

A mix looks like a derivative and is not. Re-rendering it in three years gives different bytes, because the recipe was plugin versions and an afternoon of decisions that were never written down. Six bounces of one song are six distinct sources, permanently. Treating any of them as a copy of another is how a measurement ends up published against a file nobody can name.

What actually goes wrong

The folder that does not exist is where things get lost.

A tree can be well designed and still have a hole in it. When a working folder structure has a place for the session and a place for the mastering but no place for a mix, the six bounces do not stop existing. They go somewhere else — a desktop, a scratch drive, a folder named with a date — and two months later the search starts.

What it buys you: ten minutes you do not spend searching while a client waits — and the ability to answer “which one is the master” without opening six files.

See the gap drawn — a folder tree, with real paths

works/forbidden-journey/
  1-Intake/
  2-References/
  3-Performances/
  4-  . . . . . . . . .  nothing here is called a mix
  5-Masters/
  6-Deliverables/

So the six bounces went where there was room:

~/Desktop/FJ mix 3 FINAL.wav
~/Desktop/FJ mix 3 FINAL (use this one).wav
D:/scratch/fj_v2.wav
.../2026-08-04/bounce_rough.wav
.../Forbidden Journey/Mixes/Archive/Forbidin Journey_Master.wav

No home for a thing means no home for six of them. Every missing folder becomes an improvised one, and improvised folders are not in anybody's template.
Status as a folder needs a move to change. Approving a mix by dragging it into Approved breaks every path that pointed at it. A single line naming the current master costs nothing and moves nothing.
Revision as a folder buries the file. Year, format, version and quality all vary, so none of them earns a level. In the filename they still sort; as folders they add depth and hide the master.
A name is not an identity. The same work is routinely spelled three ways across one machine — the project folder, the master's filename, the published title. Nothing is wrong with any of them, which is exactly why the identifier cannot be the spelling.

The shape

Four levels, and the class decides the level.

A folder is for something true of everything inside it, forever. That single rule is what keeps a master four clicks from the top. The prefixes are not decoration: they hold the order of the work, so the folder list reads as the job rather than as the alphabet.

What it buys you: a master four clicks from the top instead of nine — which is the difference between a backup agent reaching your work and refusing it.

The four-level structure, with real filenames

works/forbidden-journey/
  1-Intake/          the credit roster, the intake questions, charts, client demos
  2-References/      everything that came from outside. Never enters a delivery
  3-Performances/    session files, raw takes, alternates, session video
  4-Mixes/           every bounce, two-digit ordinal, never reused
  5-Masters/         the approved master and its alternates
  6-Deliverables/    every render, naming what it came from and how
  7-Records/         close sheets, retro, measurements, the pointer to the master
  8-Business/        cost model, invoices, payments
  _Exhibits/         withdrawn, retained, never re-served
  _Attic/            undeclared history. Every .bak, unopened

Three of those need saying out loud, because they are the ones that get argued about.

References sit in their own branch because they are somebody else's work. A reference song is licensed to nobody here. It may inform every decision in the session and it may never leave the building in a client package, and the only way that survives a deadline is if the exclusion is structural rather than remembered.

Exhibits are kept on purpose. When a render ships with a defect, the corrected version supersedes it and the flawed one stays — marked, with the reason, and never served again. The same practice this site already applies to its own withdrawn claims, pointed at a file instead of a sentence.

The attic is where undeclared history goes, unopened. Every working folder accumulates them — .bak, .bak2, .pre-something. They are neither sources nor derivatives, because nothing states what they are relative to: a diff with the base missing. Deleting them is how you lose the one that mattered, and sorting them is a day nobody has. So they move to the attic in one sweep, and the label means exactly what it says — retained, not under custody, may be deleted without ceremony.

Both of those folders lead with an underscore for the same practical reason the shared files in this site’s own source do: a script that gathers up a work folder has to skip them. An exhibit must never be re-served and an attic file must never be delivered, and a naming convention enforces that in every tool at once, including the ones nobody has written yet.

What it buys you: the answer to “did I get everything I paid for” — asked at the end of a job rather than two months later, when the answer is no.

Everything one session leaves behind — the full list

Source losing it loses the work Derivative losing it costs compute Record an assertion about another asset Quarantine held, never shipped

Inbound before anyone plays

The material that walks in with the client. The least organized category in every studio on earth, and the only one where the studio does not own what it is holding.

Commercial reference songSourceQuarantineThe “make it sound like this” track. Licensed to nobody here. It may inform a decision and must never reach a delivery folder, a render, or a client package.

Artist demo, voice memo, phone recordingSourceOften the only record of the original idea, and usually the worst-kept file in the project. Client-owned.

Scratch or guide recordingSourceSets tempo, key and form for everything played after it. Deleting it after tracking breaks the ability to explain a later decision.

Charts, lead sheets, lyric sheetsSourceWhat the player is handed. The version that was actually played from is the one worth keeping.

Live or rehearsal video of the bandSourceQuarantineSent for feel, arrangement and who-plays-what. Somebody else’s performance of somebody else’s song — reference in, never out.

Video the music must land againstSourceTiming-critical, and unlike everything else here. Frame rate, timecode start and duration are part of the asset. A re-export at a different frame rate silently invalidates every cue written to it.

MIDI, tempo maps, click referencesSourceSmall, easily lost, and the thing that makes a session re-openable years later without guesswork.

Parts recorded somewhere elseSourceStems or overdubs cut by another engineer. Provenance unknown at the door — a file named .wav can hold decoded MP3, and every true-peak and top-end reading taken from it would describe the encoder.

Artwork, photographs, logosSourceFrequently supplied at the wrong size by someone who no longer has the original.

Split sheets, releases, clearances, the signed estimateRecordObligations attach to these. The only assets here whose loss is a legal problem rather than a creative one.

Capture the room

The irreplaceable band. The room and the person are gone when the day ends, and nothing in this group has a recipe.

DAW session fileSourceThe assembly instructions for everything else — and the asset most likely to stop opening first, because it depends on plugin builds that will not exist in ten years.

Raw multitrack takesSourceThe performances. Every other audio asset in the project is downstream of these.

Alternate takes and playlistsSourceThe takes that were not chosen. Routinely deleted to save space, and routinely wanted three years later.

Session videoSourceFilmed in the room for content, documentation, or both. Camera masters run to hundreds of megabytes per minute, which makes their location a design problem rather than a filing one.

Mic placement, signal path, gear list, setup notesRecordPhotographs and a written chain. The delivery standard asks for these explicitly, and they are what makes an overdub two months later match.

Process between the room and the mix

Where the sorting question gets genuinely hard, because most of this is technically regenerable and practically is not.

Comped and edited sessionSourceNominally derived from the raw takes. Treated as a source anyway: the recipe is hours of human choices that were never written down.

Tuning and alignment passesDerivativeRegenerable if the settings survived, which they usually did not.

Consolidated multitrack — one file per part, common startDerivativePromotable. The day the session file will not open, this becomes the only openable form of the performance.

StemsDerivativeSame promotion rule. Drums, bass, guitars, keys, lead vocal wet and dry, backing vocals.

Mix instances — every one of themSourceSix bounces of one song are six distinct sources, permanently. Re-rendering in three years gives different bytes, so no mix is reproducible and none may be treated as a copy of another.

Reference mixes sent to the clientRecordEach one is evidence of what the client heard, and on what date. That makes it a record about a decision, not a throwaway MP3.

Deliver what leaves the building

The only stage the outside world ever sees, and the one most likely to be rebuilt from something nobody can name.

Approved master, plus the standard alternatesSourceMaster mix, vocal up, instrumental, and no-lead-vocal with backing vocals kept. The master’s authority is that it is the bytes an audience heard.

Delivery formats: streaming, CD, vinyl, hi-res, videoDerivativeEach needs its recipe recorded — tool, version, exact parameters — or the next revision reconstructs settings from memory and differs in ways nobody chose.

Video renders, excerpts, contact sheetsDerivativeA contact sheet is the cheapest asset in the building. An excerpt is not, because text burned into it cannot be read by any wording check.

Credits and identifiersRecordPerformers and their roles, producer, engineer, songwriters, ISRC, UPC. Assembled at delivery from memory, when they should have been collected at capture from the people standing in the room.

Withdrawn deliverable, keptDerivativeA render pulled for a defect and retained as the exhibit. Its recipe must never be re-run and it must never be re-served, so it carries a reason, a successor, and a do-not-republish mark.

Records what makes the rest provable

Small files, and the only ones that turn a folder of audio into an account of it. Every one is worthless if it cannot name its subject exactly.

Measurement reportRecordWhat was read, from which exact file, with which engine version and against which standard. A report that identifies its subject by song title points at every mix of that song at once.

Milestone close sheetRecordEstimate against actual, every overrun in red, three signatures — client, producer, ABA engineer.

Ingest receiptRecordA hashed manifest countersigned when material arrives. Converts “I sent you the files” from a memory into a document.

Fixity logRecordChecksums re-verified on a schedule. Without it, every other record on this list is an assertion about bytes nobody has looked at since.

Location recordRecordVolume label, path, size and digest for a source on a drive this method does not own — which is how an 830 MB camera master is accounted for without being copied anywhere.

Against the standard

The industry publishes a tree too.

The Recording Academy's Producers & Engineers Wing has published delivery recommendations for recorded music projects for years, and the current revision covers folder hierarchy, metadata collection and long-term storage. Worth reading, worth adopting, and worth departing from in exactly two places.

Adopted unchanged

Consolidated multitracks as the durable form. The mix alternate set — master, vocal up, instrumental, no lead vocal. Metadata collected at the session rather than assembled at delivery. Filename discipline and ISO dates. Checksums, and periodic migration.

Departed from

Their tree runs six levels and is organized by production phase. Ours runs four and is organized by what happens if a file is lost — because that is the fact that decides how hard to hold on to it.

The consequence

Their shape is what a client's next engineer expects to receive. So the working structure and the delivery structure are two different shapes over one set of files, and neither has to lose.

Where it becomes a rule

A milestone does not close while something in it could be lost.

Every milestone in this method closes on a verification task, and closing is a refusal point rather than a formality. Three conditions are settled in the same moment: the audio is measured against the standard, the hours are reconciled against the estimate, and the material the milestone produced is accounted for.

The third one is the newest and it works the same way the other two do. An asset audit that runs on a schedule is housekeeping, and housekeeping loses to a deadline every time. One that blocks the next milestone is a gate, and a gate cannot be walked around.

The question the whole structure is built to answer: five months later, can this production return to the state a milestone closed in — not approximately, not from memory, but the same files, provably the same?

Which puts a burden on the answer rather than on the filing: a restore that has never been run is a backup that has never been tested. Copying a file somewhere else is a hope. Fetching it back and confirming it is the same file is the only version of that sentence anyone should accept, including from us.

What this page does not say

The parts that are not built yet, named as such.

This describes how ABA organizes production work. It is not an offer to store anyone's files. No archival service is being sold on this page and none is implied.
The tooling is a design, not a product. The structure above is in use as a working practice; the software that would enforce it at a milestone boundary has been specified and not built.
Nothing here is a security or privacy claim. Those have their own numbered statements, and the correct way to avoid misquoting one is not to open the subject in passing.

Read the method → The rulebook