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Project alternatives - Any real advantages?


Danny Wyatt

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I’ve been saving new projects for years whenever I want to save a new “alternative”. I don’t have an issue with disk space, because after 10 alternatives or so I start deleting old ones. The advantage to a new project (versus an alternative) is that a new project file means that the odds of having a corrupted file I will not longer be able to use, decrease, something the project alternatives that Logic natively creates will not survive this kind of disaster (assuming you can’t even import it to a new project of course). 
 

So apart from disk space, is there really any advantage? I was testing the loading time and it seem to me that’s exactly the same as loading a completely different project. It’s loading all samples and all that anyway. If it was just loading the different changes and eventually new samples not present in the old alternative making it super fast to load, that would be ok, but other than that it seems to be the same as opening a new project. 
 

Any thoughts?

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I don't use alternative or "new version of the same project" very often.

I've the tendency to stay on one project and polish it again and again, with alternativ tracks I can mute/unmute or hide if necessary. For the global architecture of my composition (chorus/verse or 1st mouvement/2nd mouvement etc...) when I change it I get rid of the old one.

I use alternative things maybe twice or 3 times a year, roughly, but I would say that alternatives could be more convenient as everything is in the same place, in the same project. You double click one time and everything is there in a scroll down menu.

And yes, you're right, having the possibility of having "alternative alternatives" without any need to reload everything would be great.

 

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1 hour ago, FLH3 said:

I don't use alternative or "new version of the same project" very often.

I've the tendency to stay on one project and polish it again and again, with alternativ tracks I can mute/unmute or hide if necessary. For the global architecture of my composition (chorus/verse or 1st mouvement/2nd mouvement etc...) when I change it I get rid of the old one.

I use alternative things maybe twice or 3 times a year, roughly, but I would say that alternatives could be more convenient as everything is in the same place, in the same project. You double click one time and everything is there in a scroll down menu.

And yes, you're right, having the possibility of having "alternative alternatives" without any need to reload everything would be great.

 

Having experienced that, I would (and I always do) suggest creating new projects along the way, just because of the possibility that a file could become corrupted and you end up losing everything. Even for organizational purposes. For example I always bounce MIDI to audio once I’m happy with what I have so once I start doing it, all my project have the BIP suffix just so I know that In case I need to fix something I still have the midi version. Having it on a separate project always makes me question if I “really” want to fix or tweak that 🙂 

But yeah, creating alternatives that would load fast and not reload what’s already there, would be awesome!

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On 2/8/2023 at 2:53 PM, David Nahmani said:

I don't like alternatives, I rarely use them. I suppose the only advantage is that it makes versioning self-contained if you like to save projects as packages. I prefer to save projects as folders, and I save all different versions in the same project folder so that they share the same Audio Files folder. 

I started using Packages a while ago and I like it more than folders in most occasions, just because there’s less stuff to manage, but I still save different versions as new projects. I like to have that extra backup and not relying on a single file (for versioning as you mentioned). 

regarding the samples folder, I had a lot of issues in the past where I would maybe delete a folder or rename a sample, etc, and then Logic would try to find those samples and it would get them from a different project (mostly Ultrabeat, which has a weird way of working, at least from my experience). For example I remember one day opening an Ultrabeat preset that was supposed to use a HiHat.Wav file and I guess I deleted it or changed location. And it started loading a full “stem” called HiHat.Wav from another project so that was weird. 

Now with packages, everything it “locked” inside it, so even if I have multiple files with the same name, it will never try to find inside the package. 

I wish they would create alternatives that were more like a real alternative, such as the tracks alternatives. That would be super useful for a Radio vs Extended mix to quickly work on them and load them fast.

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19 minutes ago, fisherking said:

i also use packages, and just for organization-sake, i prefer seperate files for different versions (i don't do this often, just sometimes; ie a different arrangement, or a remix). never used 'alternatives' (don't really like the idea). but of course... whatever works 👍

I like the theory behind the idea, but not how it’s implemented. If it was a quick load without even hiding the project’s content, that would be great. Pretty much, imagine a button that would load multiple track alternatives at once. Fast and easy to use. Right now, it doesn’t bring anything amazing to the table, in my opinion 

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