This is a community maintained list of sources for samples. If you have something to add, please do! (Just click ‘Edit’ and make your contribution.) Comments and discussion also welcomed in the thread, but we’ll try to keep this first post up-to-date with good resources.
@Eli - what a great idea! This kind of resource would probably be better maintained as a wiki page, which this forum supports. An example on this forum is the SonicPi Online Resources thread, which was converted to a wiki page and thus editable by any user. Would you mind if I converted the “Free Sample Libraries” thread to a wiki page so anyone can add to it ?
Be my guest. I’d learn howto myself… but I just installed
Ableton Live and Helm this evening, and I’m feeling overwhelmed
(a lot)… I think I’m all out of learning-how–juice right now.
Just found this page called “Sounds from Space” It’s a bunch of recorded radio signals from space vehicles and satellites. Some very interesting sounds to play with. http://www.svengrahn.pp.se/sounds/sounds.htm
I’ve added the Versilian Studios Chamber Orchestra samples (and then realised there’s potentially some overlap in some of the libraries listed in this post as Sonatina and VSCO were used as some of the sources for Virtual Playing Orchestra, although exactly how much was used there I have no idea. Figured it’s no big deal anyway).
I’ve spent quite a long time producing code to allow the VSCO files to be used relatively easily as sample based instrument sources for Sonic Pi, with a function orchSample “instrument name” note, <other args as required eg sustain:, release: etc> which substitutes for the sample command, selecting the relevant sample and rpitch: value automatically which works quite well. It was fairly hairy as different naming techniques were used for different instrument samples, some with note names embedded and others using a numerical reference, but I’ve covered 57 different “instruments”. Note one actual instrument may have 4 different sets of samples for sustained, pizzicato, with vibrato etc.
The code is fairly hairy involving a lot of string manipulation but seems to work fast enough. I have also converted one or two of the samples to .flac from .wav which greatly reduces their size, and hope to do more in time. (You can use Audacity to do this in batch jobs)
Will publish when its a bit more refined.
Here is a incredible collection of break beats that was curated by Young Guru (He was the in-house engineer for Jay-Z’s record label) There are over 1200 break beats here. It is a goldmine if you are into using and/or chopping up breaks in your code.
Disclaimer: These breaks are in mp3 format. They also aren’t always exact loops, so you may need to do a bit of maintenance to convert them to a ready to use format. I’ve been cleaning them up in Audacity but it has been well worth it!
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