Ableton Forum

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?

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.

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

@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.

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"

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).

adamj wrote: @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.

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.