What to do with a hard drive full of unfinished songs

The pile is not a moral failing

Everyone who writes regularly has one. Writing produces more starts than finishes by an enormous margin, and that ratio is the process working rather than the process failing — you cannot tell which ideas are good without making a lot of them.

What makes the pile heavy is not its size. It is that it is undifferentiated: two hundred things of unknown value, so opening the folder costs something every time.

Do one listening pass, and fix nothing

Put aside an afternoon and listen through, and do not open a session, adjust anything, or start working. The instant you start fixing you have spent the afternoon on one song and learned nothing about the other hundred and ninety-nine.

A minute each is enough, and usually thirty seconds. You are making one decision per track, not evaluating it fairly. Some genuinely good ideas will land in the wrong pile — that is fine, and much better than not sorting at all.

Alive

Something happens that you still like, and you can imagine what it needs. This pile should be small. If it has forty things in it you are being generous rather than honest.

Has a part

The song does not work, but eight bars of it do. The eight bars are the asset; the song around them is scaffolding.

Done with it

You feel nothing. Not bad — nothing. This is the biggest pile and it is supposed to be.

Harvest before you archive

The second pile is the valuable one, and it decays fastest, because “there's a good bit in there somewhere” is not a note you can act on in a year.

So write down where it is, in seconds, in plain words: 1:12, the bass thing under the second verse. Thirty seconds of work per song, and the pile turns from a vague debt into a parts bin you can actually shop from when a new song needs a bridge.

Letting go, and not deleting

Deciding you are done with a song is not the same as deleting it, and it is worth keeping the two apart. The decision is what makes the folder usable; the deletion is irreversible and buys you almost nothing — the whole third pile is probably a few gigabytes.

Move it out of the way instead. Songs you have abandoned are also the ones you are most likely to be wrong about, because the reason you dropped a song is usually about the week you dropped it rather than about the song.

One drive is no copies

The unglamorous part. A hard drive with the only copy of a decade of work on it is not an archive, it is a bet, and mechanical drives left in a cupboard fail sitting still as well as in use.

Two copies in two places is the floor. Whether the second one is another drive or something online matters much less than whether it exists — and the copy you never verify is worth roughly what the drive it is on is worth.