I guess this depends completely on your goal. I start a new project almost ever time I sit down with the OT, because my goal is neither playing live for an audience nor producing something what could be seen as an album.
My focus is simply on single audio pieces, so there is no need to pack multiple “tracks”/songs into a single project. With stuff separated into single projects it’s much easier for me to find it again afterwards.
Same boat, single experiments, but I ended with a lot of projects! For simple tests, bug tests, I may use a specific set.
More and more oftenly I use the same project to experiment something different, I just change bank.
So you prep samples in daw then Transfer to octatrack?
Love to hear an example of the kind of audio piece you’re talking about 
And yeah I’m kind of feeling the idea of song per project and naming my ableton session the same name. Having multiple sessions spread across banks feels messy.
Is there a way to merge banks and patterns into projects later?
OctaEdit 
I thought octaedit didn’t work anymore?
OSv1.40 is not supported; and won’t be until OctaEdit v2 is released.
My advice is to wait until OctaEdit v2 is released.
As long as the projects share the same global settings and are referencing samples only from the global AUDIO folder and subfolders you should be able to copy the bankXX.strd and bankXX.work files around in between project folders like you want.
@sezare56: any additional tips?
Ah yes, of course, the slots. I’ll try to stick to fixed slot ranges for banks.
So it’s easy to merge the slot lists from multiple project.strd files without conflicts. It’s quite a hack, but works for me.
You’re missing a couple of things; but like you say, quite a hack and works for you.
Never tried, but what about Octatrack’s file manager and pen&paper for the samples?
This is very clever. Fantastic!
Pen & paper for 256 slots and their path…
Honestly i don’t understand they did not implement a Move Bank within the Card Tools menu. I actually never use this Card Tools apart maybe to rename a corrupted project…
Yeah, it’s not ideal, but once in while…why not?
Maybe use the ‘collect samples’ command (which copies all used samples into a project folder) first for projects that should be merged, now the samples are not scattered across the entire audiopool anymore… guess that would make the whole process easier.
There might be a reason why it’s not possible, but yeah, bummer.
I usually try to organize my projects from the start in a way that I’ll have to move stuff as little as possible.
No need for pen & paper. The project files are simply text containing info blocks about each used slot like this:
[SAMPLE]
TYPE=FLEX
SLOT=001
PATH=…/AUDIO/0_OWN/R-Click.wav
BPMx24=2400
TSMODE=2
LOOPMODE=0
GAIN=48
TRIGQUANTIZATION=-1
[/SAMPLE]
The real drawback of this copying around of bank files is that you are losing other sample slot relevant informations like slice details, properties etc.pp. which are stored in the markers file. Sorrily the markers file is a binary file which isn’t that easy to edit like the project file.
So it’s in no way a carefree alternative for an editor like OctaEdit, but requires quite some cleanup/reconstruction work afterwards.
Ah, that´s nifty! I never had to merge projects, when I prepare for live, I usually just copy a few patterns into a new project and do the rest by hand, I want to prepare stuff for live in my daw and go over everything twice with a fine-tooth comb anyways, so…
Still as @tnussb said, you’d miss some information.
Plus you’d have to avoid similar slot numbers and all… no really, that’s unlikely you won’t have bad surprises after Hourssssss of job.
I have great hopes that Octaedit 2 shall see the day of light thanks to @Rusty to free our chains and let us do music.
We have enough workarounds to carry about on the music side itself 
Is there any eta on the new octaedit?