How to manage your samples and sound design audio files
When the orchestra is not enough and you need to deal with some ear-splitting whoosh hits.
When you build an orchestral template, managing the different sections of the orchestra is quite straightforward. You have your strings, brass, woodwinds, and so on. But how to manage all your sound design samples? Where do you go to find this awesome sub boom that you know you have but can’t find on your massive collection of hard drives? Here, I’ll show you how I do it.
MIDI vs Audio samples
For those times when I want to compose something in the hybrid genre, whether for trailer music or the big bombastic epic cue, I need to use a sizeable amount of sound design samples and many times, I even create my own. The first question that arises is “do I use MIDI samples through the Kontakt interface or do I work directly with the WAV samples?” Opinions and workflows are evenly split on this topic but I chose my camp: I work with audio files rather than MIDI for reasons that I’ll explain in another article. If that’s the way you work, read on.
A library to manage them all
I tried keeping track of my thousands of sample files using nothing else than my file explorer and building a tree of directories but that didn’t quite work. Previewing the samples and searching for the right one is not efficient enough. Fortunately, there are a lot of tools out there that do just that: manage sample libraries. Tools like Resonic, Soundly, BaseHead, ADSR, AudioFinder, and the list goes on. Just Google for audio sample management and you’ll get a ton of results. I’ve tried many of these and I found the one that accommodates my workflow perfectly. It’s called LoopCloud and it’s free.
Among its features, here are the ones that made me use it as my primary sample manager:
- I can see the BPM of loop samples and I don’t need to set it manually, LoopCloud analyzes the loops automatically on import.
- I see the “instrument” category. Boom, Hit, Braaam, Whoosh, … .
- For the tuned samples, LoopCloud gives you the key.
- I can see the file format without having to right-click or open a sub-menu.
- I can tag my samples and search by tag. And best of all, LoopCloud does a pretty good job at auto-tagging the samples on import.
- I can do quick and simple edits from the LoopCloud interface such as changing the pitch or the BPM of a sample.
- I can see a preview of the wave form in the UI.
- I can drag and drop the original or processed sample into my DAW.
How come such a great tool is free, then? LoopMasters, the company behind LoopCloud has a business model. There’s a store built right inside LoopCloud and you can buy samples from there for these moments when you need something quickly and don’t have exactly the right sample on your computer.
Most importantly, LoopCloud doesn’t modify your samples and doesn’t store them in a proprietary database format. That means that if the tool gets discontinued in the future, your samples won’t be affected.
Working with Kontakt libraries
Many sound design Kontakt libraries give you access to their unprocessed raw WAV samples. Let’s take the example of Project Bravo by Hybrid Two.
On your file system, inside the library folder (1), you have a Samples folder (2). That’s the one you want to import into LoopCloud by simply dragging it into the LoopCloud interface:
If you look inside the Samples folder, you will see that you have access to the raw wav files used by the Kontakt instrument:
Note that some Kontakt library vendors don’t give you access to the raw samples and encrypt them. In this case, you won’t be able to use LoopCloud or any other sample manager. That is something you want to check before buying a sample library.
This is what Project Bravo samples look like once they’ve been imported and analyzed by LoopCloud:
From there, you can simply preview them and drag and drop your chosen sample into your DAW after processing it (or not):
Working with your own samples
When working on a project and creating my own sound design elements, I always take a minute or two to export the final result as a high quality WAV file and then add it to LoopCloud. You never know when you will want to reuse that awesome braaam you’ve just created. The process of importing and tagging your own samples is the same as when working with Kontakt samples: just drag and drop your WAV file into LoopCloud:
Having a well organized library of samples is a huge time saver and it will also enable you to find the perfect sound quickly without taking you out of your composing zone.
If you are interested in learning more about productivity tips, have a look at my course on building templates for strings.
