I have noticed that most of the Sampler instruments are made up from small sections of one large audio file rather than many discrete audio files (which is what I have seen in Kontakt or Logic ESX 24).
1. Please can you let me know if this the best way to prepare audio for use in Sampler?
2. I am assuming that it is a more efficient way for Sampler to work, is this correct and if so any idea why Kontakt for example does not do this?
Hope that someone can help.
Thanks
Query about sample production for Ableton Live, Sampler: individual files or one large consolidated one?
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jestermgee
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Re: Query about sample production for Ableton Live, Sampler: individual files or one large consolidated one?
It just comes down to how the author of the instrument is working.
With Kontakt instruments it may be that many different samples and velocity ranges are being used so for an acoustically modeled piano for instance, there may be the need for 6 velocity ranges per key and to tune every key hit individually it is easier to use individual samples. On the flip side, creating a drum kit from a loop pattern is easier to do by just referencing the sample zones from a single loop.
The difference in space between a single large file and 1000 small files isn't really that much. In the order of a few MB so it's not something to really be concerned about with a modern OS, more how convenient it is to work with the source material you have at hand.
With Kontakt instruments it may be that many different samples and velocity ranges are being used so for an acoustically modeled piano for instance, there may be the need for 6 velocity ranges per key and to tune every key hit individually it is easier to use individual samples. On the flip side, creating a drum kit from a loop pattern is easier to do by just referencing the sample zones from a single loop.
The difference in space between a single large file and 1000 small files isn't really that much. In the order of a few MB so it's not something to really be concerned about with a modern OS, more how convenient it is to work with the source material you have at hand.
Re: Query about sample production for Ableton Live, Sampler: individual files or one large consolidated one?
Well, if you really want to know......
This is a fairly straightforward look at the possible space consequences of saving lots of small vs one large file - http://www.ntfs.com/ntfs_optimization.htm If you want the full gory details try Wikipedia’s entries on the various file systems.
It’s about NTFS but HFS+ and APFS operate in a similar sort of way regarding clusters.
This is the sort of thing we used to sweat over back when drives were measured in Megabytes not Terabytes and optimising cluster size and partitioning could make a noticeable difference to how much you could cram onto a drive. While not forgetting to make sure the audio partition was on the outside edge of the disk because it travels through the heads faster than nearer the spindle, so gives better sequential read/write speeds.
On an HDD a single large file can also have a speed edge over lots of small files because the heads only have to find the large file once (assuming the disk is defragmented) while lots of seek operations are needed for lots of smaller files. SSDs have such low seek times any issue related to them is pretty much irrelevant; and they can’t be defragmented in any case.
tl:dr Don’t worry about it, use SSDs where speed matters and when formatting a drive just go with the OS defaults.
This is a fairly straightforward look at the possible space consequences of saving lots of small vs one large file - http://www.ntfs.com/ntfs_optimization.htm If you want the full gory details try Wikipedia’s entries on the various file systems.
It’s about NTFS but HFS+ and APFS operate in a similar sort of way regarding clusters.
This is the sort of thing we used to sweat over back when drives were measured in Megabytes not Terabytes and optimising cluster size and partitioning could make a noticeable difference to how much you could cram onto a drive. While not forgetting to make sure the audio partition was on the outside edge of the disk because it travels through the heads faster than nearer the spindle, so gives better sequential read/write speeds.
On an HDD a single large file can also have a speed edge over lots of small files because the heads only have to find the large file once (assuming the disk is defragmented) while lots of seek operations are needed for lots of smaller files. SSDs have such low seek times any issue related to them is pretty much irrelevant; and they can’t be defragmented in any case.
tl:dr Don’t worry about it, use SSDs where speed matters and when formatting a drive just go with the OS defaults.
Live 10 Suite, 2020 27" iMac, 3.6 GHz i9, MacOS Catalina, RME UFX, assorted synths, guitars and stuff.
Re: Query about sample production for Ableton Live, Sampler: individual files or one large consolidated one?
Thanks, that is interesting. This kind of optimization (sadly) seems to be almost a legacy consideration now.