Akai force file structure

How do you structure your files to keep things organised?

I pop my SD in a laptop and organise it on my laptop.

I have 3 main folders in the Root drive (not including the Synth & Temp folders):
Beats, Force Samples, & Force Presets.

Beats has a folder for each device the beat was first made on. The first is the "Akai Force Beats" folder which have beats that was first made on the Force. The rest are folders of beats made on other gear that I spent 4 years of my damn life 11/2019 to 03/2024 transferring to the Force to be remade later & just to have all my beats in 1 place. The reason it took so long is a whole another thread, but the MIDI Note Off bug slowed things down a lot.

So I got a folders named: DR202-Force Beats, MPC-Force Sample Beats, MPC-Force Synth Beats (I got 3 folders in here 1 for S900, Proteus 2500 & the XV5080), RS7000-Force Beats & SP505-Force Beats

The Force-Samples folder have folders for all the different types of sample I use: Audiobook-Samples, Cartoons-Samples, Documentaries-Samples, Drum-Samples, Film-Samples, Interview-Samples, Lecture-Samples, Music-Samples, Sound FX-Samples, Video Game-Samples. I make new folder in each to keep things organized.

The Force-Presets folder have a folder for: Force-FX Presets, Force-Pulgin Presets, Force-Project Templates.

Tip: You can use the minus symbol - to keep a folder at the top of the list. I hope all this info is helpful to you!

P.S. Is that you on the Force reddit sub asking all them questions?

One thing to notice: saving a Force project creates copies of all sample files used in the project, so if you have a 100 MB drum kit and you use it in 10 projects, you have at least 10 separare copies of all the WAVs in the kit, consuming 1000 MB of storage space. It's kind of like Ableton's "collect all and save".

This is not a problem but actually a good thing IMO, because it makes the projects self-standing and less prone to being accidentally broken.

What comes to keeping things organised, the most important folders on my 1 TB Force SSD drive are: SAMPLES which has all my sample libraries (excluding factory content), and Force Projects where I have per-month subfolders such as "2024-06". I keep one of the quick access shortcuts pointing to the current month's project folder.

In addition to those, I have folders for Force tracks and programs and other file types, where I store templates for tracks etc.

Thanks for sharing. I've just discovered today the hard way that an SD card proves rather slow for frequent autosaves at least.
Does using M3 standard SSD make this and auditioning an instant process? I've read somewhere that akai has its own speed throttle in one of its parts but I think it was about one connected to the CPU.

A great tip about the minus sign making the files and folders come first.
Thinking of how to go about it all without becoming a full-time librarian

I'll start with a project folder, and anything else in still another project while sorting by date of creation. For naming I will be using some random pressed combinations of letters.
Easy to access right away, and will be part of the project soon after anyway.

If I use and tweak a kick, I don't expect to be reusing it again. Likewise with synth presets - I treat them as good for a given context.

It is naturally tempting to fetch big drum libraries onto force, but I'll seek to use what's there already first. Some of the samples are not bad at all.

Mass storage info: https://www.mpc-tutor.com/standalone-mp ... AKAI-FORCE

The most effective thing you can do to improve load/save times is using less and smaller samples, and chained sample programs.

when it comes to collect all and save, I think it could be further streamlined becasue even if just saving a project in-place, samples which are already there appear to be re-saved, also during auto-save.

It looks like Akai is not using a 'changed' marker, which would enable bypassing any re-saving unless justified.

HouseWithoutMouse wrote:Mass storage info: https://www.mpc-tutor.com/standalone-mp ... AKAI-FORCE

The most effective thing you can do to improve load/save times is using less and smaller samples, and chained sample programs.

Loading vs saving times

Integral 512GB SD MicroSD 23.02 80.94
Kingston 120GB SSD SATA SSD 27.02 85.79

Can't see how an extreme version of an SD could be worse than 'normal'.

Sandisk 32GB Extreme SD Full size SD (Class 10) 22.46 130.01
Integral 128GB USB 2.0 USB Pen Drive (solid state) 23.01 117.18

That's a shock. SSD offers no improvement. Be it, I will stick with SD.

maybe different formatting?
What would be the recommended cluster size, by the way. Might be good to adjust it for big files, no?

If you want to test different formats and cluster sizes on SD cards, you're the one who has to do the testing.

yes, and it looks like the bus for ssd and sd is the same, based on that mpc tests. Fair enough, I am not going to complain, it is just good to know.
meantime, have done some tests.

read write

Sd card
45s 53s


exFAT 32MB allocation unit
42s 70s


exFAT 32kb allocation unit (default)
44s 45s

exFAT 4096 bytes allocation unit (default)
44s 46s

Conclusions,
1. exFAT is as quick with pendrive as it is with sd card. so these two buses are both municipal
2. Better to use default allocation unit size than the biggest available

So for me, I think I will just get a 64gb low profile pendrive and use it for the convenience it gives. Also, there are two usb ports so if one breaks, there is still a spare one

What has ocurred to me though is that if you distributed your stuff across the four available media, you could stream to the full capacity of the CPU

I use the USB ports for MIDI devices and sometimes audio, and I'd like to have more than two of them. The internal SATA drive bay is great, because it leaves all the external ports free and the SD card slot as well.