Hello,
I like the new filing system in N-Track, how the .wav files are grouped in a folder next to the .sng file. I always put the .wav files in the same song folder and have done for years.
I’m a bit of a worrier though (having lost hours of work in the past) and backup using “Save As” so I’ll have eg: song01 and song01a in the same project folder.
I also export the song folder into cloud storage as cpu crashes can be devastating.
What I’m experiencing with the new updates is:
Save - ok, all good
Save As - Creates a new folder within the project folder called “song01 1”
Save As again - Creates another new folder called “song01 2” and so on
Each new folder creation, song01 1, song01 2, song01 3 etc contains all the .wav files from the original folder.
This means if I have say 4 .wav files of 50MB in a project, each “Save As” backup creates a new folder of 200+MB which soon becomes over a GB and eats up storage meaning a project folder which should be 200MB is now 2GB.
Also, as the latest .sng file version is stored in each new folder, it isn’t replacing the original as first viewed in the project folder.
To add to this, If I try to “Save As” to an external drive, I’m then unable to save to the PC and vica versa.
So I suppose my main question is, when using “Save As” why is the audio replicated in a new folder every time when I’m only trying to save the .sng file?
I hope you can help, I’m deleting more lately than I’m saving
I have the same issues. Plus I never save my work to the operating system drive. That is the current default location. The new system requires I relocate to a different drive and find the folder where I want to save my work.
Adrian,
what do you mean exactly by ‘song folder’? From what you’re describing, it appears that you’ve created your own “custom” song folder, and then have n-Track save the song into this folder.
For n-Track, the “song folder” is the folder that is created when you save the song, and which contains the .sng file. For example if you save a song with name “Hello” in D:\Test, the structure will be something like:
D:\Test\Hello\Hello.sng
D:\Test\Hello\Audio\Hello1.wav
The song folder is now “D:\Test\Hello”
If you then use the Save As command to save to “Hello Again” and you select the D:\Test folder to save the song to, you’ll have:
D:\Test\Hello\Hello.sng
D:\Test\Hello\Audio\Hello1.wav
D:\Test\Hello Again\Hello Again.sng
D:\Test\Hello Again\Audio\Hello Again1.wav
The reason why n-Track copies all the wav files is to make each song folder (in this case “D:\Test\Hello” and “D:\Test\Hello Again”) independent from each other.
However one song folder may have multiple .sng files without duplicating the .wav files.
So if you want to backup the .sng file, you can just save to a new .sng file inside the existing song folder, so after loading Hello.sng you would save to Hello2 inside D:\Test\Hello\ (which should be the folder that opens by default when you select Save As), and you would have:
D:\Test\Hello\Hello.sng
D:\Test\Hello\Hello2.sng
D:\Test\Hello\Audio\Hello1.wav
Does this fit your workflow?
Flavio.
Hi Flavio,
May I begin by thanking you for personally responding to my support request, I have loved N-Track for almost two decades and this is great work that you continue to do.
I have so many song projects in N-Track (300+) that I have had to create “custom folders” (I recently applauded your team for adopting a filing system which I’ve been using for years
I read through your reply and it works in the scenario of creating a backup, then:
If an edit is made to Hello.sng and I want to back it up to the previous backup Hello Again.sng I get an error message saying the project cannot be saved to another folder, this also happens when trying to save to an external drive.
To work around this, I copy Hello Again.sng into the Hello folder and “save as” alternately to Hello.sng and Hello Again.sng each time I make an edit.
(Please remember I have lost lots of work in the past due to Autosave errors (I was advised to turn it off in 2019) and crashes (white screen of death) which still happens on occasion, so I have to backup each time I make a number of edits)
This results in the creation of new folders - Hello 1 and Hello Again 1, then I edit for a while, save and save as, thus creating Hello 2 and Hello Again 2 et cetera.
I appreciate that these new folders may be in the interests of data saving (though it actually creates double the data) but as a human (not autosave) I should surely be allowed to “Save As” to whatever .sng file I need to without the administration of deleting numerous surplus folders and repeated .wav storage.
Things have become very complicated in the last twenty years, N-Track is now hugely so much better and I continue to use it almost every day.
Again, thank you for your personal reply.
I look forward to your (and your team) continued success.
Many thanks and kind regards,
Adrian
Adrian,
you should not save a song into the song folder of another song. Each song folder should be independent of each other and not be nested folder. In the scenario in my previous post, Hello Again is a new independent song folder, with all its own audio files, so you cannot then save Hello back into Hello Again. I understand that you may be used to doing this, but n-Track now manages song folders automatically and you should avoid to manually handle the inside of song folders.
In the Hello/Hello2.sng case instead, Hello2.sng is a backup or alternate version of Hello.sng, and they both share the same audio files. So in this case you can choose to save Hello.sng back into Hello2.sng (or to Hello3.sng in the same folder) and it should work fine, no audio files will be duplicated and no folder created.
When you’re loading songs saved with earlier versions of n-Track, and then save using the Save command, n-Track will keep the legacy file structure. If you however do Save As, it will create a new song folder and copy the files into it. If you want to keep the legacy file structure, and want to create a backup of a sng file, you can copy the .sng file from Windows explorer to a new file (in the same folder), then have n-Track save to the same sng file, so you end up with the old and new versions of the sng.
I would however recommend that you migrate to the new file format. When you start working on an old song, you can load it, then save it into a new clean working folder that will contain only n-Track-managed song folders, and then keep working on the new location. If you then want to save a backup sng, you can do that in the same song folder and audio files will not be duplicated. Also note that n-Track will be creating snapshots of the song in the Snapshots folder, so the need to manually save backup copies is greatly reduced.
Flavio.
Thank you Flavio, this is great advice.
Best wishes and kind regards,
Adrian
Foe me this is nightnmare. I have multiple folder created, double, triple, and more copies of the original files…when I try to save the same sng else where it creates a new folder, changes the the name of the file…
So I spend loads of time deleting files, folders, relinking original files to the song and trying to understand what’s happening… 
What is the last n-track version that didn’t have this behaviour ? Is it possible to revert to it ?
Juan
Hi Juan,
I had a similar experience and when connected to autosave to google drive it soon filled up the available storage.
I think the best way is save as in the original song folder then the audio and other info are in one place.
I may be wrong but I did go through this and asked a similar question.
Good luck 
Ade
Even saving in the same folder creates new folders and files… I “got around it” making copies of the sng file from the file explorer as someone else suggested. It still creates a new folder for the frozen tracks but then they all go there for all the sng files and it doesn’t create duplicates of the project files, just need to think about that workaround everytime I want to create a new version of the song.
Juan
Hi Juan,
I understand your pain.
I first started using N-track 20 years ago, it’s come on a lot since then and improved a thousandfold but I realised early on that you can’t store all of the projects in the designated folder, if you’re busy like me, you need to separate it out and create new folders outside of the N-Track folder.
The team made changes earlier this year to reorganise the filing system (sort of in a way users like you and I adopted) reduce the file size (previously the frozen files were .wav), the CPU processing power and the memory consumption.
During this I found that every time I used “Save As” a whole new folder was created duplicating the .wav files and creating storage issues, especially if you have automated cloud backup.
The way I work around it is by creating a project folder, for a song. I save the sng file into the project folder and it then creates other folders inside of it for snapshots and audio but that’s cool, 'cos when I use “Save As” within the same project folder but add “a” or “2”, it doesn’t duplicate the audio files and I can have different versions saved as sng files within the project folder without eating up the memory. I just have to check the snapshots and delete some of them if it’s getting busy in there and using a lot of memory.
It’s also easy then to backup as everything is in the same place.
I hope this helps.
Ade
Hi Ade,
Thanks for your detailed answer. Since using N-track (version 2) I always had each song and its files in its own folder. So in a folder called “song”, I have guitar.wav, vocal.wav, etc… and song_1.sng.
Then I was doing exactly what you are saying, saving song_1 as song_2 in the same folder “song” to have a second version of the song.
Since the last update, if I do this, it creates a subfolder called “audio” where all the *.wav files are duplicated. Also even if I try to save song_2 in the same folder, it saves it into the new created “audio” folder…!? If I try to save song_2 as song_3 the same process repeats with a new “audio” subfolder.
So no way for me to use the command “save as” without duplicating the *.wav files even if I try to save in the same folder…maybe I’m doing something wrong but I don’t know know what it is…
could someone post a Video of the way this is suppose to work?