I have a SH!TLOAD of drums...

.........and i'm trying to get them onto my 5k. I was getting alot of "Error, Invalid Formats" for many of my samples, but someone recommended i save to 44.1khz Windows PCM .wav's and i'd be fine. And this is working like a charm.


However, i have tons...TONS of drums, and to avoid checking on them all one-by-one, i've downloaded a mass audio file type converter. I noticed a lot of the MPC's stock samples are in mono, and one guy mentioned to save my samples/drums as 44.1 mono, and one guy didn't specify. That worries me because many of the samples i found in the akai folders were also 44.1 stereo.

It'd take weeks to go through each individual drum to check which are stereo and mono....any recommendations? I dont wanna run this software on my stuff if converting will diminish the quality of the sounds. On the flipside, sounds that would only play on my PC and error in the MPC are now playing just fine on the MPC.


suggestions?


Suggestions?

stereo should be fine. just convert them all to 44.1k wav files

When your drum samples were first recorded, most were probably recorded mono. When they were Sampled, they were probably taken off albums or from whatever in Stereo. Kicks, Some Snares, Some Claps, Hats, etc..., will be can be mono going into your DAW(its up to the engineer/Producer) Snares, Claps, etc... with a Left to Right or Right to left effect, should definitely go in stereo so you can keep that feeling.... But if you are trying to batch convert, and you got room on your Harddrive, I personally would convert all of em in stereo format to not lose anything. And then when you are Tracking out to your DAW, decide what goes in stereo and mono from what you hear from the sound(if you can).

install dbpowerconverter

right click your sample folder, search *.wav

ctrl-a to select them all

right click, and go into db context menu,
choose wav and format of your choice, and bang, watch em go!

Lampdog wrote:If samples have panning or effects that use left right then = stereo.

If samples don't move left right then = mono.

Just because wav properties say stereo, it's not always stereo.

Take time to go through your favorite samples, you don't have to do it all in one day or two..

Use a batch audio converter when you convert several samples at once.

I was thinkin' the same thing. You're not gonna use every last one of your "SH!TLOAD of drums" sounds. This will actually be a good time to go through your sounds and purge your library of uselessness.

At last count I had around 60,000 single drum hits, so the day I decide to go through them all to check if each file is mono or stereo is probably the day I either top myself or give up beatmaking altogether!!

Hey man,

Download a program called Awave Studio. It converts any audio format to whatever you want and you can batch process. The cool thing is that it shows you what sample rate you import and whether it's mono or stereo. You can import a shitload of samples and see them all in a window with their file attributes before processing the batch. Program does a boatload of shit besides that too. Make sure to check it out.

why do you need that many drum hits?

why do you need that many drum hits?

Yeah, quality over quantity. Probably over 50,000 of them suck. Ever delete anything? Should have been going through and keeping your favorites. Now you got all these samples you will never use. Go through and grab some favorites. When you find say a thousand good samples just work with those and forget the rest.

Forget the mono thing too as that would waste too much time just to gain a little HD space. Just convert to stereo. Some samples will really be mono samples wasting memory and HD space but if they are just short drum samples it's no big deal and not worth the work.

two words
AUDIo FInder


http://www.icedaudio.com/

BxJaze wrote:It'd take weeks to go through each individual drum to check which are stereo and mono....any recommendations?

Do yourself a favour... ...check out 'WAV MP3 Converter' from the following link: -

http://www.hootech.com/wav-mp3-converter/

It will batch convert a whole folder of sounds, with custom settings for bit rate and depth as well as convert between multiple sound formats.

As part of the batch conversion (say you wanted every sample converted to a WAV at 44.1/16bit) it will also let you select an option to automatically keep the channels the same as the original file, i.e. if your original sample is mono it'll convert to mono, if it's stereo, you'll get stereo.

The conversion is super fast and I've easily converted whole folders of GBs of samples and it whizzes through them in seconds!!!

I've used WAV MP3 converter to organise all of my MPC libraries - very cool indeed.

Hope that helps.

Lord Toranaga wrote:why do you need that many drum hits?

I see it as a luxury to be spoilt for choice when it comes to samples, especially if you don't sample from vinyl and rely on packs for your sounds. You also have to bare in mind that 75% of what you pay for is garbage unfortunately!

When I first bought my 2kxl in "99 I had no record deck (still haven't), but I did have the early Pioneer CDJs and a copy of a drum sample library my friend gave me. I think there were maybe 3000 hits on there but most were shite, so after a year or two I had used the best kicks and snares and struggled from that point on trying to get the best out of what I had. I realised that if this was the way I was going to carry on making beats I obviously needed more sounds...

Fast forward a few years, and with more money but less time on my hands I was able to buy additional better quality sounds, so gone are the days where I was left scratting around for kicks and snares thankfully.

60k may be overkill, but these days I am a serious sound collector so it doesn't matter to me either way. I can land on any sound in my collection in under 10 seconds, so a big part of the buzz is discovering new sounds I never even realised I had. And yes, I do delete sounds from time to time.

I see. @ Northern, that converter looks nice. Most won't preserve mono or stereo like that so I'll check it out.

Lord Toranaga wrote:two words
AUDIo FInder


http://www.icedaudio.com/

this looks amazing, shame there is no windows version