How do you guys downsize your sample library?

For of those of ya'll with gigs and gigs of drums and other instruments on your hard drive, how do you conscise and downsize your library to only the best and usable samples.

I have a 120gig drive onboard my MPC totally filled up now with most of my Akai sample CDs. It's kind hard sometimes browsing thru all those folders looking for a particular sound or program. So I'm looking for some tips and ideas on how you guys decide what to keep and what to trash so only the good stuff is left for daily use.

keep the ones you like, delete the ones you haven't touched in a few months. make back ups, and refernce them later, maybe your taste will have changed

I have all of my shit arranged into files that I have easy acess to. Like all of my EMU stuff I have in 1 folder with subfolders for the particular moudle like mo phatt, vitriouso, so I can just load that module if those are the sounds that I want to work with, then inside the subfolders I have them broken down even futher like bass, strings, drums etc. These are small files so I tend to always have them avail for easy input into a particuar beat I'm working on. I do the same for my roland and akai sounds. but after a while I ask myself if I really am going to use it. If I don't think so I burn the programs down to CD-rom and just archive them. But I do have my set of sounds that I generally look for like basses stings and horns that I have and I just have those on auto load. Like 20 basses, 20 stings, and 20 keys and my main drum and precussion program that loads when ever I turn on MY mpc. If I can't get it with those then I will start to dig in the folders to look for a certain sound.

bhunt wrote: But I do have my set of sounds that I generally look for like basses stings and horns that I have and I just have those on auto load. Like 20 basses, 20 stings, and 20 keys and my main drum and precussion program that loads when ever I turn on MY mpc. If I can't get it with those then I will start to dig in the folders to look for a certain sound.

That's a good way to start working on a track. I never thought about using autoload for the basic bread and butter sounds. I'll have to give that a try!

How much RAM are your autoload samples using when you boot up?

Are you rocking 512 megs of RAM? I currently have to 272 on my MPC. Also how big is your hard drive?

Thanks for your input as well LT!

I'm on a 60 gig hardrive and I still have the 272, the upgrade in ram is my next purchase. My auto load is about 50 meg not much, but enough to get started.

Since most of the samples are off records, I just delete samples i never touch and make note of which records they came from. I try to keep things minimal so its easier to keep track of samples. It depends on one's personality tho. Some people like keeping things around 'just in case', altho they'll never use it.

I keep most of my samples on my one of my computer drives

I wouldn't delete anything. Just get a bigger drive. As stated, organization is key. My last hard drive, before the crash, rest in peace, (makes sign of the cross) was a fvcking mess. The good thing about it crashing was that I had the opportunity to be ULTRA organised when I got my new drive. Now when I hit load, I see 2 folders, one is Sample Library, the other is Seqences.

I believe his drive is 120gb. That is the maximum for a mpc4000. You could get a 400gb usb drive, I believe that would work.

Lord Toranaga wrote:I believe his drive is 120gb. That is the maximum for a mpc4000. You could get a 400gb usb drive, I believe that would work.

I was thinking about getting one of those Lacie terabytes drives.

Like this one: http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=10462

Would that work?

Summer2000 wrote:I was thinking about getting one of those Lacie terabytes drives. Would that work?

how the hell would I know? You are really gonna spend that much on a hard drive for your mpc?

naww...wishful thinking

On the serious tip though I do need a huge USB drive cause I'm missing out on a lot of my Akai library goodies due to the onboard 120gb drive being filled up.

my drive s full now too - its 40 gg only though ... i ll not delete anything but just keep it as another backup in my pc - than i ll insert a new 120 gg drive in my 4k, bring most important ish there and bang on ... this way i ll have everythin backed up - ... and 90 % double

... and i cant wait to have my drive organized ... i m gonna organize it similarly as ddot_SFV ... my current one is an absolute mess (more than 50 folders in routefolder) ... it always was ... and since i ll finally be able to drag and drop i ll even organize my new backup drive ...