How to name
versions

This is not about our product. You can use every word of it in a plain folder on a plain drive and never pay anybody anything. We wrote it because the alternative is what most people have, which is nine files called final and no idea which one is.

Put the date first, and write it backwards

2026-08-03, not 03-08-2026. Year, then month, then day. Do this and your files sort themselves into the order they happened, in every program, forever, with no effort from you. It is the single highest value habit here and it takes one week to become automatic.

Day first looks natural and sorts everything by day of the month, which puts January the 3rd next to November the 3rd. Month first is worse, because it looks correct for a while.

Give the song one name and never change it

Pick a short name the day you start. Keep it even when the title changes, and titles always change. If the working name is lantern and it comes out as "Every Light On The Water", every file is still lantern. The release title lives in the metadata, not in the filename.

Renaming a song across four years of files is how versions get orphaned. You will not find the demo from 2024 if it was called something you have since forgotten.

Say what changed, not how good it is

vocal-up tells you something. better tells you nothing three months from now, and final tells you nothing at all, because everyone writes final on the third of eleven versions.

Useful words are the ones that describe a decision: no-strings, slower, dry-vox, radio-edit, label-send. If you cannot think of what changed, that is worth noticing on its own.

Put it together

Date, song, what it is. That is the whole system:

• 2026-08-03_lantern_rough.wav
• 2026-08-11_lantern_vocal-up.wav
• 2026-09-02_lantern_no-strings.wav
• 2026-09-14_lantern_master-v2.wav

Four files, and you can reconstruct four months of decisions without opening one of them. Underscores between the parts and hyphens inside them, so you can read a name at a glance and so nothing breaks when a file crosses between machines.

Name the bounce after the session

If the session is 2026-09-02_lantern_no-strings, the bounce is the same words with a different extension. When you need to change one note in a mix you sent in March, you will find the session that made it in about four seconds instead of opening six and guessing.

Write down what you sent, and to whom

A text file next to the songs is enough. One line per send: the date, the exact filename, the person. When somebody replies six weeks later saying the second one was better, you will know what the second one was.

This is the step everybody skips and the one that hurts most to skip. The version you sent is the only version that matters to the person who heard it.

You will still get it wrong

Some nights you will save something as asdf2.wav at 4am. That is fine. The system is not there to be perfect, it is there so that the ninety files around asdf2.wav still make sense, which is usually enough to work out what it was.