#27

There is also Resonic Player (https://resonic.at/), seems to have much less features than Audiofinder, but it’s free…

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#28

There was some chatter in the plugins worth buying thread about this the other day. You might check it out.

#29

I use audio finder for that kind of task but the media player built into Reaper is also really really good.

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#30

This one always looked interesting to me

#31

Been using XO this week and I just wanted to report that the interface is amazing and really well thought out/intuitive. It is very obviously geared towards one-shots/drums but it really makes browsing samples into an engaging and interesting experience. I like in particular the way it helps you consider samples as a set.

2 Likes
#32

I was looking at it too but haven’t fiddled with the demo yet. Can it only use one-shot (I’m assuming small file size) samples or can you put anything in it?

#33

Yeah, I can’t find a specific cut-off point mentioned in the docs but it seems to not recognize samples that are over a certain length. (by trial and error, I think the length is around 20 secs). Definitely a limitation but it makes sense in the context of all the editing/filtering UIs. I wish that there was more explicit info about what kinds of files are recognized/picked up/rejected when you scan a folder.

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#34

Interesting. They bill as it a sort of AI so I’m guessing they’re trying to get it to recognize certain things similar to drum hits. Fast attack & release, quick decay, nothing too long in sustain. I’d be curious to know how deep that goes though - like does it filter out certain high frequencies (less likely in drum hits) for instance?

I’m mostly curious as it could be a nice grab bag kinda deal for generating odd kits if done right (droppedglassbottle.wav as a “cymbal” for instance). Maybe I’ll pull the trigger and give it a shot (pardon the pun).

#35

And then I come across this on another thread and for $30US I’m like, why not?

#36

What are good options for batch converting sample files between different sample rates and bit depths on Mac? I have a Morphagene and Octatrack, which both prefer different sample formats, and I don’t have the patience to do this task in Ableton or Reaper.

I was looking into AudioFinder, which in addition to batch processing, would have the huge bonus of helping me organize the myriad of audio files on my hard drive. Anything else I should consider?

#37

Sox is an easy and free solution from a Terminal.

There’s also Audio Hijack if you prefer using a graphical interface.

By the way, if a Shell script expert or Mac Automator ninja knows how to batch copy/convert hundreds of samples recursively using Sox while keeping the folder structure, I’d to be glad to know how. Thanks.

Here’s a tutorial for Sox:

3 Likes
#38

I highly recommend Amadeus Pro by Hairersoft. It’s a very sleek tool for stereo audio editing and allows very customizable batch processing.

You can create batch templates and then drag and drop folders. With options to save as file types, append name variables, delete original or not, and even add processing such as fade ins or normalization.

Try it out. It was the first program I bought for my first Mac back in 2006! (There have been updates. Haha.)

3 Likes
#39

Instead of a for loop like that article suggests, using find with the -execdir flag to execute the sox command for each file found might be a way of preserving the directory structure.

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#40

iZotope RX ‘batch process’ is truly my favorite for this but Audacity with macros is an awesome free option.

#41

Ah. This is finally a relevant thread for me.

After years and years of thinking about it, I recently decided to take a stab at building a system for organizing and curating my various sample libraries and collections. It’s still a growing and evolving, but I think I have a pretty solid foundation.

The TL;DR is that I’m attempting to turn my sample collections into something resembling a centralized Zettelkasten, and storing it in SQLite. My approach is to try manually catalogue, tag, document, annotate, etc content in a centralized place, and then build out solutions that can integrate with this database format.

A Zettelkasten is a means for storing and retrieving information in a very granular fashion. Well, sample libraries are like that as well. Zettelkastens usually have some sort of cross-referencing capabilities. Over time, this network of connections allows for interesting relationships to emerge. I’m hoping if I keep at this long enough, these sort of relationships and structures between samples and sounds will naturally form.

Now, for the tools and implementations.

A few weeks ago I started building a Generic Zettelkasten (the “zet”) for myself, which is part of the static wiki generator I built for myself about year or so ago. The Zet structure is essentially a key/value database with timestamps. Using this structure, I can make things and link things to things. Every “thing” has a UUID4 tag as the key (I use the uuid4 library by rxi to generate these). Keys don’t have to be unique, which allows a single item to have multiple attributes.

One of “things” a thing can be is a file path, presumably pointing to a particular sample. Things can also be things like messages, groups, and references to other things (via the UUID address). This provides the baseline for an annotation system and a tagging system.

My Zet and Wiki are both stored as SQLite tables. In addition to having an expressive querying language, SQLite also has goodies like full text search which make it a really powerful file format.

SQLite also has a strange experimental archive format called SQLar, which I’ve been very intrigued by. I’ve build a bridge between my Zet and SQLar which is called Crate (inb4 Rust did it first). Crate makes it easy to automatically import files stored in a SQLar archive into a Zet database.

The Zet can be imported/exported using a tab-separated-value plaintext file. This allows the Zet to be managed using source control. The Zet could then be cloned onto a new computer, and then “compiled” into a SQLite database. The repo would only manage the metadata, not the samples themselves. The samples would be contained inside of SQLar archives as small self-contained collections (presumably on some external drive), and then copied into the compiled SQLite database when they are needed to be used. Also, I’ve set things up so that TSV files can be broken up into groups. That way, I can configure things in such a way to only partially compile the database if things get too large.

The Zet is included in my static wiki engine. My wiki can be scripted using an embedded version of the Janet scripting language, so conceivably one could potentially use it to generate interesting presentations of the Zet. My efforts here have been quite minimal so far, as I’m mainly focused on just dumping information into the system.

Finally, integration. Fortunately for me, I mostly use a home-brew computer music system, so I can do this with minimal friction. This is also pretty early. Currently, I have implemented the ability to load a WAV file into a buffer if provided with a partial UUID, which can then be used in various samplers and table-lookup oscillators included in my ecosystem. This streamlines sample usage quite a bit for me. Instead of cherry picking samples from various parts of my filesystem, all I have to do is load one SQLite database, and know their UUIDs (which I can figure out using utilities and SQL querying).

This is all being dogfooded right now. I am actually using this right now to build what I hope to be a an end-game centralized sample library for myself. If this actually ends up being something useful, my hope is to publish the wiki parts of the database to my website, as well as make the metadata repo public. We’ll see.

The end.

6 Likes
#42

Thanks! For converting recursively that sounds great indeed. And do you think it’s also possible to have Shell/Sox clone the whole folder and sub folder structure somewhere else and duplicate the files and convert them while keeping the originals intact ? Such a script would be a massive help sometimes when you want to copy and convert a whole folder i.e. a Maschine expansion from Native Instruments to an Octatrack Sd or MPC CF card for example. I need to learn shell /bash haha it’s on my todo list

#43

Does anyone recommend this ADSR browser for free sample management? … thinking of giving it a go:

3 Likes
#44

I need to try this one, thanks for sharing! I recently tried the XLN XO and Sononym, XO is surprisingly efficient for creating crazy kits from scratch, Sononym was fine but a bit slow, and both were out of my budget at that moment. Will test the ADSR asap

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#46

I just tried it… It’s really good! The automatic tagging, key detection, and plugin operation make it a no-brainer. Thanks for linking.

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#47

Re: ADSR Sample Manager

Yes I’m testing the software too! :slight_smile: I quickly loaded a large amount of samples (49k+). The interface is clear and accessible. Of course it has a direct access to the ADSR web-store and you can optionally download or buy some pre-purchased samples packs from this interface directly. It’s super easy to include your own search paths too and the software will analyze them relatively quickly, starting by tagging from the filenames and then analyzing the files in more depth.

I’m not particularly convinced by the audio analysis part, it’s not as good as Sononym for tagging the samples by “sonic nature” of course - but hey it’s free ! - and the pitch analysis is really fine and the whole thing will be really enough for me, not too complex. The software seems to mostly rely on the filenames for creating the “tags” and “genres” and sometimes create tags that don’t make any sense but you can quickly adjust that manually.

Sample navigation/preview is super fast, you can add multiple tags in the search bar, search by names, you can even apply a filter (LP, HP) non destructively, create some collections, quickly add some favorites and drag&drop one or more sample directly to a folder or to a DAW or sampler. And there’s a button + shortcut for selecting a random sample. (Hopefully in a future update, it’ll create some random kits too, that’d be cool :D) The goal here is not to find similar sounding samples as in Sononym and XO but I think it will be very efficient for selecting samples hidden on my hard drives.

It’s a great tool for the price :smile: and it doesn’t drive the CPU/GPU crazy on a MBP.

Thanks again for sharing the link.

1 Like