The first thing to say is that you should not be moving sound files or folders used in a Mixcraft project manually using Windows explorer. Mixcraft 4 keeps track of the exact path to all files used in a project in the .mx4 file. If Mixcraft cannot find a file, it will start searching your hard drive for the missing file. It may or may not find the correct file. If you have several drum.wav tracks on your hard drive, which one is the correct one?
You may have noticed that unless you change the name of a track in Mixcraft, it will just use generic track names as part of the file name when you record a wav file.
Example:
06 Track1.wav
07 Track1.wav
You can easily have several other files of the same name in other project folders. When searching for missing files, Mixcraft may find some other file of the same name and try to use that file.
This is just one of several reasons to get your recording process organized.
I'll show you how to handle moving Mixcraft sound files further down the page.
Recording a project into one big folder somewhere on your hard drive is not a very good idea, but fortunately it's pretty easy to get organized in Mixcraft 4.
I made some screen shots of a great way to work through projects and stay organized. It's not that hard to do, and it only takes a second or two to get set up.
Follow along on the screen shots:
I like to use the My Recordings folder in the My Documents folder.
Under My Recordings, I have two folders.
One folder is for Finished projects
One folder is for Work in progress
When you start a new project in Mixcraft 4, go down to the Project tab
Click - Change
Navigate to the Work in progress folder.
Click - Make new folder
Change the new folder name - Type the name of project
Example names used in screen shot: Unfinished 1, 2 or 3
Now all the wav files that you record during this project will be in this folder. No other project sound files should be in this folder. You have to remember to change the project folder location when you start a new project. If you forget to create a new folder, you can still create a new folder and move your project to the new folder. How to do that is next.
Once you finish your project, you should move the project out of the work in progress folder and into the finished project folder. Do not move this folder manually in windows. This is how things get messed up in Mixcraft.
Mixcraft 4 has a great feature for moving projects. A Mixcraft.mx4 project file needs to know the exact path to every file used in a project. When you use the Mixcraft Copy Project Sounds To feature, Mixcraft will move every file used in a project to a new folder and it will create a new .mx4 file that has all the new file location info.
Another reason to move projects using the Copy Project Sounds To feature, is to delete all unused wav files in a project folder. For example, you have about 50 files in a project folder, 20 of them are overdubs that you did not use. Mixcraft only needs the 30 files that were actually used. This is one way to gain back disk space and get rid of the garbage.
You can move a project and then delete the old project folder, which will free up tons of disk space. I typically have twice as many files in a work in progress folder than in the finished project folder.
Disk space is cheap these days, but there's no need to have a bunch of unused files in your project folders.
To move a Mixcraft 4 project
Click - File
Click - Copy Project Sounds To...
Navigate to the Finished projects folder
Click - Make new folder
Change the new folder name - Type the name of project
Example names used in screen shots: Project 1, 2 or 3
Of course you will have a song title by now for your song, so just rename the folder to name the song.
You will get a pop up window about Cleaning out the destination folder.
Make sure the folder you are moving your project to, does not have any files in the folder.
Click - Yes
You will get another pop up window about changing your recording folder
Click - Yes
Mixcraft will now move the project. The new project folder now has all the correct audio files for the project and a new .mx4 project file that has all the correct file paths for this project.
You can delete the old project folder now if you want to.
You can also use the Copy Project Sound to... feature to move projects to storage drives. I have a couple 500gb network hard drives where I store older projects. I do go back and open old projects every now and then. If you want to work on an older project again that has been stored on a external hard drive, just move it to your local computer using the Copy Project Sound to... feature and then open the .mx4 file on your local computer.
Hope this helps you get organized.
It has worked out great for my projects.
