audio sample organizer

[adamj]

I've been thinking a lot about what features I really could use in Ableton 9 (besides 64-bit, but I won't beat that dead horse), and one feature idea has continually resurfaced as I'm actually making music and not just day-dreaming about some random thing I think I need:
I need help organizing my audio samples in a way that's tightly integrated with Ableton.

Over the years I have amassed hundreds of gigabytes of samples across (at least?) 10s of thousands of files. I try to keep it organized, but the hierarchical folders of an operating system's file system are just not cutting it for this amount of data.

I started trying to organize things manually using symbolic links on OS X (this is basically equivalent to shortcuts on windows), because I don't want many duplicates of the same audio file to save space. For example, the real files exist based on the source they came from, but I also want them in a category folder, in a favorites folder, etc. So I symlinked them over to these other organizational folders. Unfortunately I was very disappointed to discover that Ableton ignores symlinks in its itegrated browser

I guess I could request the feature that the browser doesn't ignore symlinks, but there's likely some performance problems there with circular references and such. In any case, I wouldn't need to use symlinks if Ableton's browser provided the following features:

• let me tag any file in the browser with an arbitrary metadata tag ("funky drums", "wobble bass", etc)
• let me see a list of all tags and perform basic tag management operations like renaming tags, deleting tags, merging tags
• let me search/filter files by tag(s)
• let me rate my files (a basic 0-5 stars system should be fine)
• let me search/filter files by rating

In the meantime, does anyone have any suggestions for a separate software tool for OS X that can help me with this?

[seventhirtyfour]

I just have a folder on my desktop that you can access through Ableton. Within it just labeled folders with "kick", "snare", "vox". Within that you could rank the separate files based on 5 star folder, 4 star, etc. right? Maybe I am not sure exactly what you're getting at. Of course with the amount of samples you have it would be laborious, but just an idea.

[simmerdown]

pick 128 of every type of hit, sample, whatever...put them in samplers...throw the rest away.

[adamj]

@seventhirtyfour - I guess it's hard to explain, but I want to be able to do a "multi-dimensional" search based on various criteria depending on my needs of the moment. You can do stuff like this in Omnisphere if you have ever used that. I think I heard Native Instruments has similar features (maybe in Kontatk or Kore?) but I haven't used those.

Maybe a better example will make it clearer: I'd like to do things like search for drum loops that are (a) good for house music, AND (b) in the 120-130 BPM range, AND (c) that I have rated 5 stars. A standard file folder hierarchy simply cannot do stuff like this. If I could tag things "house" and "120-130 BPM" and also rate them, then I could search this way...

@simmerdown - LOL, ok point taken, and yeah, maybe I am a bit of a hoarder and should cut down. But I think there's a lot of value in being able to search in the way I just described, regardless of how many samples you might have.

[oblique strategies]

Here's an interesting read from 2010 that highlights some pros & cons of metadata management by a proprietary & non-proprietary methods:
http://www.musicofsound.co.nz/blog/you- ... r-metadata

For now I'm using iTunes for some of this organizing, but will be looking into 3rd party audio asset management system apps like:

AudioFinder
SoundMiner
Basehead
Snapper

Here's Wave Agent:
a free app from Sound Devices
http://www.sounddevices.com/products/waveagent.htm

Compatibility may be an issue if you switch sample manager apps as illustrated by this excerpt from the article linked to above:
"It seems anyone can create an app that adds metadata to a .WAV file, the issue then becomes who can read it? Now I’ve used ProTools as my primary sound editing DAW for the last 18 years so whatever metadata I embed I want it to be readable by ProTools. But over the years I’ve tried & used many different solutions for managing my sound library and at the moment SoundMiner is my app of choice. Now I’m pretty sure I’ll still be using ProTools 5 years from now, but SoundMiner? I’m not so sure… It does a great job but I have also investigated a number of other options and I’m not 100% convinced that give or take a year or two of development I may well end up switching to a different sound library app. With this knowledge the idea of proprietry metadata becomes a significant issue: why invest time & energy adding metadata that can’t be read by other apps, should I eventually migrate?

So what metadata do I add via SoundMiner?
When I started HISSandaROAR, after doing tests with the main Mac contenders (SoundMiner, Basehead, AudioFinder, Snapper) I discovered the only metadata that worked with all of them was the DESCRIPTION field"

[adamj]

Thanks for the info oblique strategies, that's really helpful. Looks like most options on the market are waaaay overkill for what I want. Might be time to roll up my sleeves and build my own custom solution (I write software for my day job).

[friend_kami]

@simmerdown - LOL, ok point taken, and yeah, maybe I am a bit of a hoarder and should cut down.

not if you're doing foley.

also a def +1 on the FR.

[Karlstens]

In looking up the new information on Live 9, it doesn't appear to have tags or metadata for searching via the browser. Extremely sad panda if this is the case.