Sample archive, tree..list...thread?

#1

As another user brought up samplers, i’ve been thinking about something…

Aldo i played guitar and drums before venturing into production, without samples i would actualy most probably lost interest even before a decent start. Recording seemed too complicated and demanding for starters, and aranging and production seemed like wizardry.

So…

Could we somehow have a dedicated and organized place connected to this forum to share samples? Or something like that? Place where everything would be labeled and organized properly so you would automaticaly be aware or what the sample is, which format, who’s the creator and what’s the licence for it?

…Or maybe we already have it, and i’m simply not aware of it?

It would be great if we could organise it like a tree with downloadable files, so you wouldn’t have to waste time looking thru the whole forum topic with all the the descriptions, comments and broken links just to find some samples?

#2

Ardour has an internal concept (exposed in the GUI) of the “clip library”. It relies on you and your filesystem to organize things as you wish.

If you want something more than that, the FLOSS app Samplecat is a dedicated sample library manager.

We’re not going to host a repository for samples on ardour.org - there are too many other (some great) examples of that. The canonical example would be freesound.org which you can reach from inside Ardour or via your your web browser.

We do host a small library of loops on ardour.org which you can download from inside Ardour. Since I first created it several years ago, there have been essentially or precisely zero requests to add to it.

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#3

Yes, i’m aware of freesound.org. I do use it, basicaly daily, mostly for sfx and atmosphere layering.

linuxmusicians.com has a thread, lmms’s forum has an archive, karoryfer has very cool samples etc. There is a lot of that, but it is all scattered.

Yea, i noticed available loops in Ardour. That’s cool, i’m just not into that. Never used readymade rythms/progression/melodies.
I was thinking more of one-shot instrument samples, kicks, snares etc, synth stabs&pads, choir samples etc.

I was just thinking aloud, woudn’t it be great for a newcomer to be greeted with organized samples…mainly cause that’s what got me going, and in general, samples can be quite useful.

Just the other night i pulled up some old multitrack recording session. Here and there, mostly on breaks, i would come across a clean snare or kick hit (nothing special, but still usable), so, that’s the other thing that got me thinking - how many of us had similar stuff that could be extracted and used in some form?

P.S. Don’t get me wrong, i find that you and Robin already do teriffic job, and i also suspect that everything is already too demanding. This was more like - what can this forum as a community do? Like, you know, it could be possible to create an archive, hosted somewhere else, and then you just link it to main site, something like that?

#4

It is also really amazing what you can find on https://archive.org/
You can literally find original sample libraries from long retired samplers, ie Ensoniq EPS for one. Most of these are in their original disk.img (or whatever) format, so you will need to convert them into your favorite sample format, but there is some really good stuff if you know how to do that.

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#5

The last time I checked which was years ago samplecat was suffering significant bitrot and no longer would compile, has someone updated it recently or something?

#6

Fixed just today in the openSUSE proaudio repo. I still didn’t test it…

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#7

I am confused. freesound offers all the things you say you want and is integrated with Ardour. You want to look for X, just go in the import dialog and look for it. Want somewhere everyone can upload to? Better to do it with an already established site like that than duplicate effort starting another.

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#8

I just did. I can’t use the player and it goes mad with CPU usage.

#9

Hmmm…to be honest i didn’t even consider freesound.org to be a musician’s thing, aldo it is great for sound designers/sfx for videos, and theese fields often realy do overlap.
Now when we’re bringing it up, i’ll have to try that thoroughly, (aldo i do use freesound daily for sfx and find it quite good in that regard) but last time i checked there wasn’t so many good and clean instrument one shot samples there (not to even begin of something multylayered velocity-wise).
I might be completely wrong, but that was my impression, i’ll have to check that.

The other thing you mentioned that got me thinking in another way is “somewhere everyone can upload to” …and, on a second note, i would like it to be linux exclusive, or even better linux+ardour exclusive somehow (don’t ask me how…i don’t have a clue…yet :slight_smile: ).
Why?
It’s simple - for quite some time, i’m on a a personal crusade against mindless consumerism(with the strong accent on “mindless”), for lack of a better and more elaborate expression :slight_smile: .

#10

With common formats between platforms these days, there is really nothing exclusive anymore. A wav file is a wav or a flac is a flac regardless of OS. Of course one could always design a Linux only app to access a custom server, but what would be the point? :smiley:

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