SoundMiner "Mirror" to .flac and save a lot of disk space

PROBLEM

🤯 It’s crazy how fast disk space fills up since I’ve been in the game industry. The work I did in the 2D animation field comes nothing close in terms of disk space usage. Long gone are the years where I’d barely fill 500gb of disk space over multiple productions. Mind you, I was doing rigging and other technical work that didn’t require me to have animation scenes.

Given that I have little to no control on how large a game engine project becomes and that buying any form of reliable and accessible storage is quite expensive, I have found that the thing I have the most control over is my sound library size.

SOUNDMINER

✨ Using SoundMiner’s “mirror” function, I have been converting my .wav library to .flac format and it’s crazy how much of a different it has made! It preserves the metadata, so none of my previous hard work has been lost.

DAWs handle .flac format differently, but my workflow is to browse SoundMiner and to “spot to timeline” in Reaper. When doing so, the .flac becomes a .wav before it gets to my Reaper session and it does this in record time. I haven’t noticed any additional waiting time during spotting.

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🤔 NB: A NOTE ABOUT .FLAC & OTHER LOSSLESS FORMATS (.WV) 🤔

The .flac format is not a "miracle" format and has its own set of limitations. Amongst those, you'll find:

• A maximum of 8 channels for a single audio file;

• 32bit is not supported;

• Not supported by every potential audio application/software, but quite a few do. Do your research!

  
  

My sound library has quite a few 32bit files and I didn't want to leave them as "heavy" .wav files. With a bit of research, I found that SM can also convert to .wv (called the WavPack format). This format is quite interesting!

• File sizes can be a bit smaller than .flac's;

• 32bit is supported (🎉);

• Supported by less audio application/software than .flac, but Reaper does.  Do your research!

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BEYOND COMPARE

💡 Chatting about this with the community, it’s been recommended to me to also use BeyondCompare to ensure that any file that is not a .wav is copied over to my newly made .flac folders (very useful as recordists often provide pdf and xls files with additional information and metadata).

It gives me piece of mind over not losing any .wav file that did not convert to .flac due to being 32bit (depends on your SM settings). Super useful and much less stressful.

If you are wondering as I was, the Standard edition of the software is enough to perform the desired actions for an individual.

STEP-BY-STEP

➡️ Here’s the workflow steps I take:

1. In SM, I select the files I want to convert to .flac. I personally prefer doing this by clicking on the little folder with a magnifier icon, left of the search bar and navigating from and to specific folders, and then doing a “select all” shortcut.

   
   

2. In SM, I click on the “Mirror” icon in the main top toolbar (5th icon from the left of the search bar, by default) and pick my settings.
   

   

   
   

   

   
   

3. In BeyondCompare, I use the “Folder Sync” functionality. I put the path of my .wav folder on the left, and the path to the corresponding .flac folder on the right.
   

   1. In the “Operations:” dropdown menu, I pick “Update Right”.
I click on the tiny “Rules” button (the little guy with a hat, between Operations and ——> Filters) and I set the following: 


      1. Comparison-> check “Align filenames with different extensions”


      2. Name Filters-> I add “.*” to the “Exclude files:” block.


   2. Once those settings are active, I click on the “Sync Folder” button and voilà!
      

4. I then do a double-check to confirm that I have the same number of files in my .wav and .flac folder and then delete the .wav folder.
   

5. FREE SPACE!

✅ I reduced my library size by ~50%, freeing fully one of my external SSDs and a lot of space on my internal hard drive. ❤️

So if you’re in a similar situation as I was in, I recommend giving this a shot!

Enjoy :)