How Do You Organise Your Sounds

aight i got tons of samples onmy computer and i was just wondering how you lot organise your snares claps whatever i was thinking of putting them in clap, snare, kick files but then i got some shit what i dont even know what sound it is. How do u organise yours to make it easier to pick out stuff you want?

Cop that one, and you can edit and create programs too.

SCI;
Yeah man. It's difficult. I'm editing sounds for two sample CDs and I'm always on the verge of losing control of my sound library. Anyway, I do two things.

One: I make specific kits...and kits for me means a single set of sounds usually assigned to the MPC pads( I use MPCPGMMaker software) that includes all drums, percussion and guitar, bass or even keyboard sounds that I wanna use from the MPC for that song or group of songs. I also name these kits and name the songs/tracks after the kits for easy recall.

Two: I make generic WAV or AIFF folders for Bass (Acoustic, Electric, Synth) and so on. This separates up the library so, I can actually choose what type of thing I wanna get into before I even start to work. Then I create a kit consisting of these sounds and move it to the MPC, if I'm using it for that track or set of tracks.

Good luck.

Peace.

Basically, what you are probably thinking right now is right. There is no easy, 1 step way do organize your sounds. Kind of sucks. You have to have your own method (like dude just described). Something you're going to stick with and understand. File management is indeed a Beeeeiiiitch! Pretty much every body does it different. I'm saying this because, for a long time I thought I was a dumb a** because I didn't know a definitive way to do this. So basically, join the club. In the words of Michael Jackson, "You are not alone". If you find a good technique, please let a brotha know.

Now this is a bit of a ridiculous suggestion for non techies, but get yourself some kind of database software, or at least a decent spreadsheet, and layout records of data about every single sample. How to get them in there, I dunno. There are ways to automate almost any process. Then add columns to describe each sample, a category column, etc.

That way, all you gotta do is run a search through your database and you've got your sample.

You could do this real easy on linux or with some free database software and a scheduler which would automatically search the system for new wav files and add them to the db every night.

Not that I'm doing this but if you're really overflowing with samples, g'head.

-tank.