Organize music samples, recordings and projects

Every producer’s drive tells the same story. A folder called Downloads with three sample packs still zipped, a vocal_FINAL_v4.wav a client sent last week, four bounces named master that you can’t tell apart, and a project file you’re fairly sure has the good version — somewhere. Stems arrive, samples pile up, voice memos of hummed ideas scatter across the disk, and the one export the label asked for is buried under the ten you made getting there.

Elegant File Explorer sorts all of it for you, with rules you set once — and it does something no producer should skip: it backs up your project files automatically. Everything runs on your own PC, nothing uploaded. The Audio & Music and Recordings & Streaming packs are built for exactly this.

Samples and loops, ready to use#

Start with the raw material. The recipe “Samples and loops in one place” recognizes the loops, samples and one-shots you download by their names and format, and gathers them into Audio\Samples, tagged Sample — your sound library in one spot, organized and ready to pull from instead of hunting through Downloads mid-session.

If you’d rather see a rule take shape before trusting one, here’s a small version you can read at a glance:

1. Open Auto-organization and click + New rule.
2. Rule name: Bounces.
3. Monitored folders: + Add folder, Browse…, pick your Music folder.
4. Which files (conditions): with the tab on Any (OR), add a “Name contains” condition for each — render, master, bounce, mixdown.
5. What to do (actions): “Move to” → a Audio\Renders folder.

Click “Simulate effect” for the Preview — nothing is actually changed, then “Save rule”. The matching recipe, “Audio renders and masters,” does the same but adds a guard so it only grabs actual audio files — .wav, .mp3, .flac, .aiff — and never a document that happens to have master in its name. It files them into Audio\Renders by month, tagged Render, so the exported mix never gets lost among the stems again. Pick it straight from the Recipe Gallery and it’s done.

Back up your projects — before the crash#

This is the one that saves a career’s worth of grief. “Music project backup” makes a safety copy of your project files — .flp from FL Studio, .als from Ableton, .rpp from Reaper, .ptx from Pro Tools, .cpr from Cubase, .song from Studio One — into Backup\Audio Projects by month. The original stays exactly where it is; this copies, it doesn’t move. So your DAW keeps opening the same file, and you quietly build a dated history of every session. The next time a project corrupts or a drive hiccups, you have somewhere to fall back to. Never lose a beat to a crash again.

Stems and the mess of collaboration#

Anyone who mixes knows how fast stems turn into chaos — a folder of vocal, instrumental, acapella and stem files traded back and forth, none of them dated, all of them named the same. “Stems and split tracks” recognizes those split tracks by name and files them into Audio\Stems by year and month, tagged Stem. Each session lands dated and together, so “send me the stems again” stops being a twenty-minute search.

And “Voice notes in one place” rounds up the recorded ideas — WhatsApp PTT files, anything named voice or memo, .opus recordings — into Audio\Voice notes, tagged Voice note. That melody you hummed into your phone in the car doesn’t vanish anymore.

Recordings, streams and the content pile#

If you record as well as produce, the Recordings & Streaming pack handles the video side of the same life.

• “OBS & screen recordings by date” recognizes screen recordings — the date-stamped files OBS saves, plus anything named Replay or Recording — and files them into Recordings by year and month, renaming each to 2026-06-05_name, tagged Recording. A clean, chronological archive instead of a heap of .mkv.
• “Live streams and recorded content” gathers the heavyweight stream files — over 500 MB, with live, stream or vod in the name — into Contents\Lives by month, tagged Live, keeping the giant files out of the way.
• “Cuts and clips for Shorts/Reels” rounds up the short clips — clip, cut, short, highlight — into Contents\Cuts by year and month, tagged Cut, so your posting pipeline is actually organized.

There’s a recipe for meetings too, and it does more than file. “Meetings: tag to transcribe later” spots Zoom and Teams recordings, moves them into Meetings by month, tags them Transcribe, and sets a reminder so you don’t forget to actually go back and transcribe or review them. And for the podcast side, “Podcast: episodes by year” files anything named like an episode into Audio\Podcast by year — your back catalogue archived and easy to repurpose.

Space, freed without deleting a thing#

Sample packs and stem sessions are heavy, and they accumulate. The nice side effect of getting them into named folders is that you can finally see what you’re keeping — the renders here, the raw stems there, the backups over there. When it’s time to free up room, you’re deciding on organized folders, not a wall of loose files. If your drive is genuinely tight, freeing space without deleting anything you’ll miss pairs naturally with this. And the {year} and {month} tokens the recipes use to build those dated folders are worth knowing — our guide to file placeholders walks through every one.

Nothing is deleted, everything can be undone#

Automating a folder full of unfinished work is a fair thing to be nervous about. Two features settle it. “Simulate effect” shows the full outcome — every move, copy and rename — before a single file changes. And every run is logged, so “Undo” reverses it. Note that the project backup recipe copies, so your originals never even move; and where a rule does move a file, moving is moving, never deleting. You can preview each recipe first and reverse it after.