How do you manage your samples and loops?
Ok, this might sound off-topic. But it needs not be. Sonic Pi can do a lot with samples and there’s probably an appropriate way to handle those files.
Been growing increasingly interested in the problem of sample/loop management. Basically, it’s too easy to start accumulating bits and pieces of audio and it quickly becomes difficult to find the ones you need.
Sounds like it’s really not a solved problem. But it’s probably not such a “wicked” problem that there can’t be a fitting solution for it.
The Sonic Pi approach to this problem is probably through the filesystem. Which is why Discourse suggests that this topic is similar to the Print Samplepath thread by @synchron. My exploration is possibly at a more abstract level.
Part of it has to do with different types of samples. One way to think of them is related to length, but not exclusively.
We already discussed wavetables in other threads and they’re extremely short samples, meant to be used as oscillators. That’s the micro-level. At this scale, samples are somewhat similar to synths.
Then you have short one-shot samples meant to be triggered rhythmically, particularly with percussive sounds (:bd_808
) or sound effects (:misc_cineboom
).
Then, there are soundfonts and other sets of samples meant to work together as an “instrument” (often using recordings from individual notes on the same instrument). @robin.newman has been using those to great effect, though there’s no native support in SP3.
After that, you get into short clips and loops (say, :loop_amen_full
), which people often mangle in fun ways.
Above that level, we get into “stems” and tracks, not to mention full pieces of music.
Apart from wavetables, our beloved musicking environment can handle all of these things pretty well. And the included sample library from freesound.org is pretty well-organized.
(In a way, it reminds me of the Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge. )
But how can we manage our own sounds in a way which makes sense in Sonic Pi? Or, conversely, how can Sonic Pi help with the problem of organizing sounds to make them easy to retrieve?
Would be interested in what other people are doing. In fact, part of this interest stems from writing an academic article about “digital musicking” and other forms of “sound appropriation”. So, apologies if it’s too conceptual.