How to name
versions

None of this needs our product. It works in a plain folder on a plain drive. Skip it and you get nine files called final. You will not know which one is which.

Put the date first, and write it backwards

2026-08-03, not 03-08-2026. Year, then month, then day. Now your files sort themselves into the order they happened. In every program. Forever.

Day first looks natural. It sorts everything by day of the month. That puts January the 3rd next to November the 3rd. Month first is worse. 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 when the title changes. 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.

Rename a song across four years of files and 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. final tells you nothing at all. Everyone writes final on the third of eleven versions.

Useful words 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. You can reconstruct four months of decisions without opening one of them. Underscores between the parts. Hyphens inside them. You can read a name at a glance, and 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. Need to change one note in a mix you sent in March? You find the session in about four seconds. Not by 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.

Everybody skips this step. It is 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 the ninety files around asdf2.wav still make sense. That is usually enough to work out what it was.