Latest / Dits & Dahs / file any other name
Transcript
- Sue: As someone who works in the music business dealing with multiple rights owners, either helping them or licensing on behalf of or being a licensee of their works in my generation, one of the things that is been a feature is that I've been in the business at a time when my first full time job in publishing, music publishing, was basically analog. Meaning that all the contracts are typed out and we were just starting to use computers. You're working with the computer now and figuring out how you're gonna name the files that you create. Because at the time there were eight characters available in the file name. And so for a lot of companies, you'd adopt a numerical sequence of some sort. And maybe as things need be, you'd introduce an alpha. combination that was easily identifiable. And of course you develop the file folder name and you figure out how to create the directory of folders and files and such. And in those days, there were a lot of us that were doing like freelance work and we weren't beholden to anything but sort of a general sense of standard of how that file name came to be, such that anybody you'd want to look at the file with some explanation in an email might have the key to remember what that file name association and the contents therein of the data. But it also meant that everybody that was independent was free to create their own echo chamber of what it is that those eight characters were gonna be. So when the computing progressed to the point that you could now have long file names, people relaxed and decided I've got all this space where I can decide what characters are going to comprise the file name. So in the course of like a music publisher, you would have maybe a catalog number, maybe you'd have a composer last name, title of the work, certainly, just enough so that the viewer of that file could determine what it is the file contained. But it also meant But there were people who couldn't edit their own thoughts well enough when it came to file names that chose just to just let it all fly and without regard created really, really long file names. Now there's some reason for that because sometimes you get yourself in a folder of files which is fairly specific, and if they all line up then visually you can more easily see which one is the divergent one and that might be what you need to look at. besides the most recent file date and all of those kind of clues that help guide your perusal of those files. But sometimes you get a situation where somebody who has stayed independent so long that they've never revisited their naming process for those files. And when such time comes that they sell their company and the assets the recipient that purchases the IP realizes that you have such a generic file name that gets reiterated so many times without the specialization of a specific composer name such that now you have over the spread of the directory a hundred different files that share the same name. You know, composer agreement. Nothing else. No date. No name just composer agreement. You can say. Yeah, well you gotta know what folder you're in. Well true. Well what if somebody decides to move the folders around and the contents they're in? So the interesting thing for me in all of this is sort of forensically looking at the file names of Data that I receive because a composer has written a new work of music or we've acquired the publishing rights to another catalog or a license deal for X, Y, and Z to see how people formulate their file structure. Because it all starts with the file name. It has to be memorable. It has to be something that indicates I need to go over here to get the back end of this. What I find interesting of late in my life. Is that the variety of tasks that I'm doing, whether it be for my own content creation for this blog, or whether it be revisiting a former client's old files to see what needs doing to update them, or to go into a new acquisition of data to see what it is that I need to do for my day gig, how important it is that at some point, even those of us who work independently, have like the Chicago Manual's style of file naming standards in such a way that within the organization that you're working everybody is directed clearly and that there shouldn't be an ancillary document that says this file name corresponds to this document. I mean if that's what it's gotta take to bridge the gap between the two bits of information, that's only gotta be temporary. But it's interesting perspective. And you know, for my file making naming processed these days, I tend to be quite explicit and only v abbreviate those terms which I know are universally understood. And I'm also aware that everybody that's searching these days is just plugging, you know, a composer name and title into a search engine and gets very fast results with File Explorer without messing a beat. So making certain that things are spelled correctly is far more important than abbreviating things. Because the other thing is is who's gonna agree on abbreviations? I don't go down that road. I'm a music engraver. A lot of people prefer to use more than two letters and an instrument abbreviation. Sometimes it's necessary to do that. But generally, I wanna have minimal amount of characters telling me the most amount of information. Maybe that's why I like doing puzzles and creating ciphers. Anywho, ⁓ I digress. I must move on to other things. But are you all working in businesses where you've seen the transition over a couple of decades to file naming processes and trying to sort out what somebody else's work created that you now have to unravel. Don't mean that in a judgmental way, it's just, you know, you have to make things work for you, right? 'Cause after all, you control you, not the files. So thanks for listening. And thanks for sharing your energy. I appreciate you.