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Hi all,

I'm trying to do a hard drive clean up, and I'm wondering about something: If you sign tracks on an exclusive deal in perpetuity, and once you've delivered all of your files (originals, alt mixes, etc), do you keep those WAV files? I have done so up until now, but they are taking a fair amount of room on my disk and I'm just wondering if it's necessary. Obviously I'll keep the DAW sessions for each track just in case, but it feels like keeping the masters once I've signed over rights to them and delivered them to the library seems pointless.

Any thoughts?

Seeing that it is signed material, I would keep. Its always a good Idea to get a separate hard drive backup for any important music/session files. You never know what might happen. I keep 3 copies on 3 separate hard drives. One is a 8TB that backs up everything including deal paperwork, copyright paperwork, sample data, etc.

Totally agree with what aaronnorthern said

Since you value keeping the daw sessions, keeping the masters is an extension of that in case you arent able to open those sessions in the future.

Storage is relatively inexpensive and continues to go down in price every year. I find mechanical drives ideal for this as opposed to ssd’s for sample library storage.

Do you store your daw sessions and masters on a separate hard drive? ie not OS drive?

Never throw away ANYTHING. You could have a track signed exclusively by a library and 7 years later, they contact you for a mix change to secure a placement. You may have a corrupt DAW session but the wav files could save your butt down the road. Buy some external hard drives. Terabytes are cheap these days.

Casey

Many composers print stems in case the project or any components (VIs, FX, etc) fails to function years down the road. Since you state that you're keeping the project files, I'd think that the Master wouldn't be too much more space on top of any other audio files included in the project archive. As said above, storage is cheap.

Ok, thanks for your thoughts everyone. I was inclined to keep everything anyway, but thought I should ask in case all the replies were like "why would you keep that?"

Anyway, off to buy some cheap storage