Tip: Producers & Engineers Wing - Technical guidelines

[PBuryk]

Hello folks!

Here are the recommendations the Grammy Gang has for metadata, naming conventions, and other stuff that applies when one works together with other organizations and people in the mixing and mastering world.

It is recommendations and they are debated and in my experience often ignored by the pros; as an example, they recommend that everything is recorded in a minimum of 96/24 while many still prefer 44.1/24 (I'm one of them).  Agree or not, there are a lot of interesting things there to keep in mind and I always keep an eye on what they write. Hope that this can be useful or at least interesting for someone here.

  https://www.recordingacademy.com/produce...guidelines

@Jostein -

Thank you for providing these references! One recommendation that I see often violated is the naming of files and pathnames, where certain characters used cause unintended actions
depending on the OS platform of the DAW or other production service. As presented by this committee, a limited character set is a good way to eliminate most of these issues:

As cited in the document: "Delivery Recommendations":

FILE NAMING CONVENTIONS
The naming of BWF files is an extremely important variable in a robust archiving methodology. There are a number of approaches that the Committee reviewed, such as limiting illegal characters as listed by the Operating System (macOS, Windows 10, etc.), or listing the illegal characters as noted for the creation of an LTO LTFS data tape, but the decision was
made to take a more minimalist approach. In doing so, there would be a much higher chance of recovering data over the long-term. As mentioned above, one should never consider the
quoted storage life of a data carrier like LTO tape to infer that there will be appropriate hardware available, but, in foreseeable limited circumstances, it may be possible to take a
forensic approach to try and recover the data. Given this hypothetical circumstance, the Committee’s guidelines for legal characters is considered the best solution for the long-term
viability of the BWF files. If the character is not listed, it is assumed that the character is “illegal”. For example, “white space” (e.g. a blank space) is illegal. Aliases, and hard or
soft links should not be used in the creation of a valid filename.

The file name length shall NOT exceed 255 characters, including any path name.

“Legal” characters are the following:
A….Z
a….z
0….9
“period” .
“underscore” _ _
“hyphen” -

Cheers!
Patrick