Unused audio files piling up and eating hard drive space
We all like to get a little messy during our writing sessions...multiple takes on audio recordings, crops and bounces on a clip until we get just the right cut, and of course exporting every draft along the way until we get to our final version.
Have you ever wondered how much hard drive space all these audio files are eating up in your Live Recordings folder? I've been thinking about this for the last few weeks, when I reached the dreaded MacOS warning that my hard drive was almost out of room.
So I built a tool that scans my live recordings folder, reads through the contents of the .als, and identifies audio files that are sitting dormant and not contributing to my projects. It then moves them all to a folder you choose where you can then choose to do with it whatever works best for you.
My results were 8gb of unused samples, and 10gb of exports! For fear of deleting anything, I zipped up the folder and backed it up on Google Drive where I have a ton of storage.
I want to add a disclaimer that I am very sensitive to the onslaught of slop tools that have been rampant in this subreddit and all over reddit in the last few months. I've set an intention with everything I develop to provide actual value and solve real problems. I for one am pretty stoked about the 18gb I just recovered!
This is 100% free and I'd love to share it with the community here. It's for MacOS only as of right now. Everything I make is officially notarized by Apple, no bootleg installers or sketchy security warnings.
Let me know how much space this saves you!
Sample Sweep - Free download for MacOS
If you want to take a look at the code, you're also welcome to poke around in Github