Hi,
I have a library of sound samples for my hobby of music making.
Some are on CDs, some are on my hard-disk. Formats are AKAI, WAV, Pulsar,
Audio.
I am trying to find a way and hopefully a tool for improving the task of
finding and auditioning samples for a music project.
My current, horribly inefficient way would involve browsing through my CDs
or sample folders according to the names, genre etc., but by this method I
rely on the samples to be properly and strictly named, I skip a lot of good
and matching samples on the way, and still I have to go through too many CDs
until I find the better samples. Changing CDs is definitely not the
creative part of making music...
To solve this problem, the ideal tool would:
1. Have a central database of samples, allowing searching for the samples in
a single location
2. Allow assigning user categories and tags to samples, and provide
searching capabilities accordingly
3. Allow auditioning of the samples directly from the database, without the
CD inserted. For this to be made possible, the tool should be able to have
a "thumbnail" of each sample stored in its database. This is quite
straightforward - you can compress a high-quality sample to a mono,
low-quality sample which would be 5% or less of the original size, still
maintaining the ability to audition the sample.
4. Allow auditioning of the actual high-quality samples, when they are
available (e.g. from the hard-disk or if the corresponding CD is in the
drive).
5. Allow easy integration with sequencers, e.g. drag&drop of a sample from
the database view into Cubase.
6. Support as many sample and CD formats as possible - to serve sections 3-5
above.
After searching for a while, I found too little. There are some tools
available, however, none of them really delivers.
Here is what I found:
* SampleCatalog (http://www.geocities.com/samplecatalog/)
SampleCatalog is great, free, and does all of the above except for managing
an auditioning database (section 3 above). This means that your catalog is
very organized, but you still need to swap CDs to actually audition samples.
* SampliFile (http://www.nexoft.de/products/samplitools/SampliFile.htm)
Almost the ideal complement to SampleCatalog - it stores all samples in a
central database to enable offline auditioning, and you can choose to
compress the samples as well (theoretically an ideal section 3).
However, the program looks amateur, mixes English and German language, and
for some reason refused to read any of my CDs (WAV or AKAI) - saying "this
CD has an incompatible format" (the same error that it gives even when the
drive is empty...). Folders cannot be grouped, and user tags or categories
cannot be assigned.
* HAL (http://www.halion.co.uk/)
A bit like SampleCatalog, but only for Halion samples.
Bottom line, nothing passes. I am looking for a good, working tool - that
would combine the abilities of SampleCatalog and SampliFile, that is - the
features listed above. Does such a tool exist?
There is an alternative, I guess:
I can convert all of my samples to WAVs on the hard-disk (using Chicken
Translator or similar), then use an audio compressor to turn them into MP3
files (or similar), then use a generic MP3 or file cataloging utility (such
as the great Music Library or even better for the task - WhereIsIt) to
catalog the MP3 files and allow search capabilities. The MP3 files would
remain on the hard-disk, and will be used for auditioning. When the perfect
sample is found, I can go to the actual CD to get the high-quality sample.
This method will work, no doubt. But it also requires the usage of at least
two utilities (converter, catalog) instead of one, meaning no automation of
the task. Still, it is the only working solution I can see at this point.
Is there a working, proven solution for this task? Of-the-shelf
products are naturally preferred. |
