How do you audition/manage large libraries of samples?

[tagutcow]

This isn't technically a question about synths or keyboards, but I'm sure many people he could offer me some advice.

 

Namely, when you're dealing with hundreds or thousands of sample files on a computer, how do you go about auditioning and managing them when you're putting together a track? Back on my Mac OS9 computer, when I was working on a song and wanted to construct a drum kit, I would go through hundreds of drum samples, dragging them pretty-much one-by-one into a shareware drag-and-drop audio player, and then dragging copies of the samples I liked to a separate folder. It was a tedious and time-consuming process, and absolutely my least favorite part of making tracks.

 

Now on OSX, it's even worse! I can't find any decent shareware applications like there were for OS9, so I have to use the EXS24 sampler to audition samples (and although I'm just getting into Logic Studio, I'm not terribly impressed with the EXS24 overall.) I drag a group of samples into EXS24, arrange them in contigious keyzones, trigger them through the piano scroll notation, write down the note names of the samples I like on a scrap of paper, go back into the program editor (dragging windows this way and that because the EXS24 windows are all pop-up), see which sample is referred to by each note names, go back into the Finder, look for the sample with that name (not easy since it's usually something like 'TTLO04X18.wav') and then 'label' the file in a color. I have to repeat this process for each sample, and then repeat the entire process for a whole other group of samples since EXS24 can only keymap 127 of them at a time.

 

The only shareware I could find for OSX was MPlay, which barely works as it is. I paid $5.00 for registration and never got my code!

 

This has always been a hairy process for me, and it's only gotten hairier. Surely somebody out there has found a way to streamline this process!

[Meatball Fulton]

Try Audio Finder. It's $70.