As you work with the DAW, you're not just creating a single file like a Word document. Instead you are creating a folder that includes the DAWs kind of proprietary file, and then a collection of assets. And it'll change from DAW to DAW and how this exactly is kind of structured on your hard drive. But there will always be some sort of folder, inside of that will be the project file and then next to that will be a folder structure that holds all of the assets. As you start working the DAW, you'll see that more and more assets are created. There'll be an audio files folder that will have a different audio file for every time you hit record. and that, that may have a file structure inside of that. And then you'll also see folders for things like cross fades, for analysis files. For undo history because you can re maintain an undo even if you close and open the program often. and then different analysis files and kind of intermediary files for when there is time stretching. It's important, really, really important that you keep that whole file structure together. Remember that your, your file is not just an individual file, but a whole project folder. So, I would take a moment to look back to one of your projects or to start a new project and just to see how that project folder is maintained on your hard drive. Now, this interaction many ways in that when you save, saving becomes a little bit more of a complicated thing. And that there are two ways to save. You can do a Save as. That creates just a new file, a new DAW kind of proprietary file that references those same audio files. Or you can save in a way that creates an entire new project folder and copies all the necessary assets over. Hit Save As in your DAW and see what those options are. It's really important that you understand the difference because you can get into some sort of file management nightmares if you're not careful. One of the worst things you can do is save a project folder inside a project folder. The DAW will have a hard time knowing which audio files are associated with the project file. And you're just going to have a hard kind of file management thing. It gets very confusing. So you have to be very careful when you are creating a new project folder that you put it in a new location and name it well. With those two kinds of save as, there is different kind of, use, use cases for them. If I had, if I'm saving the individual just project file, that's great for creating a new version. So say I was going to delete the chorus from my tune, kind of rearrange things. I might just create a new project file and not the entire folder. because that new project file would reference the same audio files. I wouldn't be taking up more space on my hard drive. And the save will go much quicker. And then I can try what I want, make the big change. If I like it I can keep on going, if I don't, or the next day I don't like the edit, I can go back to that previous version. If I want to transmit the entire project folder to someone else. If I want to sh, share this file with someone else, it's best to create an entire new project folder that includes all the necessary assets. So copying all that data into a new file structure. Once you do that, you'll have a single folder that you can then zip. Which is data compression and send us someone else. And he'll, you'll be assured that that other person will be able to playback everything. If you were just to send them a project file, all of these audio files be missing and they wouldn't be able to playback the file. So it's very important that you're careful with your file management. And that you know where things are being saved. Remember that you're always going to be moving the entire project folder if you want to share the folder with someone else. And if you want to save a version you can just make the new project file. But in general just don't mess with the file structure that it creates. Leave things the way they are and you'll have a, you'll have a much better time working with DAW. Some of the hardest problems are when that DAW file gets taken out of the project folder. That's when bad things tend to happen. I'd like to take a moment to show you the file structure from a variety of DAW projects. We'll start with Pro Tools and if I open up a Pro Tools project folder, you'll see it does have the Pro Tools session file. That includes all of your audio clips, so those are references to the audio files it includes the MIDI data. All the global information like tempo all your automation, really the heart of the session. But it does not include the audio Files that are part of that session. Those exist in a separate folder which we see right here. In this project folder, I was using non-interleaved files. So you see we have a separate L and R for every one of the stereo tracks. Not ideal, but we can still work with it. We also see we have a Session file backups, which shows us previous projects so we can kind of undo back to certain places. And we have a Wave cache which stores kind of the visual overview of all the waveforms in the project so things can play back smoothly. If we look at a Logic project, we'll see something similar. We have the Logic session files. Now, this project I did a Save as, and I just saved a new project file, I didn't create a new project folder. So, both of these project files will reference the same exact set of audio files. And if I was to destructively change one of these audio files, it would change in both of these project files. We also see there's a project file backup, just like we had in ProTool, in the ProTools file structure. If I look at a live project structure, we'll see a similar thing, in that I have one or more of the logic set files, the session files. And I have a samples folder, which is the same thing as an audio files folder. Live organize the samples folder a little differently, in that it has separate folders for how the files were recorded. And along with each one of the audio files is an analysis file talking about how it can be time stretched and manipulated. So, we see that we have the same things no matter what the DAW. There's an audio files or samples folder that includes all the samples. There are analysis files which tell us how the samples have been manipulated. And there's a session file which contains all the references to the audio files, plus all the MIDI data and automation and global project information.