Sample Management

Elektron Gear Octatrack
#1

Hi Guys,

i wanted to distract you from the blurry pics on this page and ask one (or two) question about the octatracks sample management functions. I am quite familiar with the OT, but this thing is really giving me headache for a long time now.

So i have this project with several songs on several banks. The sample list for static machines is almost full with sounds i recorded during jam sessions within this project. All those samples are in the audio folder of the set.

Question 1: Is it somehow possible to define a location where my sampled sounds are placed when i save using “SAVE SAMPLE COPY”? Now it’s placing my samples always to “MyMessyOctaSet/AUDIO”.

Question 2: Now the bad thing has already happened and my folder “MyMessyOctaSet/AUDIO” is full of samples. But actually I’d prefer to have the samples in dedicated folders (like “AUDIO/snares”, “AUDIO/basslines” or “AUDIO/moog” or “AUDIO/analog rytm”). Is it somehow possible to move the samples and then refresh the slot list so that the slots would point to the new location? I can do this manually, but for about 100 samples that is a lot of stupid work…

Thanks in advance

#2

  1. there is a “save samples to” setting where you can define if the OT will save to the audio pool or the project folder. It’s under “personalize” if I remember correctly.

  2. It think the only thing you can do is to move the samples and then relink all the machines to the right sample. But yeah… it might take a while. Afaik there’s no automatic relinking, the only thing that could potentially be used to do that is the “card tools” utility on the OT, but that doesn’t even have a “move” function, only “copy”.

1 Like
#3

Hey Papernoise,
thank you very much. Thats’ s what i thought :frowning: i guess i spend the evening relinking some sample slots…
OH, WAIT A MOMENT: I bought OctaEdit about 6 month ago. I think there was way to do what i want with that, wasn’t there? I was almost about selling it again. Does anybody know if it is capable of relinking slots?

1 Like
#4

I think and I hope so!

#5

I am gonna try tonight…

#6

If not you can ask Rusty about it… he’s in Q&A mood right now :slight_smile:

1 Like
#7

[Project] -> [Settings] -> [Personalise] contains an option to save your samples to the Audio Pool or Project folder by default. More then likely you have this set to Audio Pool. Thus it will just dump them in there. If it is set to Project, they will go in the root of the Project folder.

To clarify, so you want to move your existing samples, and thus reorganise your audio pool after the fact based on the type of sample? (Kicks, Bass, Loops, Vocals etc)

OctaEdit has a ‘Collect’ function, that allows you to collect the samples used in a Project to either the Audio Pool, Project or a custom location (that must be somewhere inside the Audio Pool or Project folder hierarchy); use the ‘Location’ dropdown in Samples -> Edit to define where to save to; thenthe press ‘Collect’ button.

Note that this will affect all samples in the Project… I haven’t specifically created a function to save selected samples to a different location; but this could be done if need be. I think it will be of limited use though, aka my development effort is better spent on other features that will be more widely used.

What you can do is go through a process of exporting and re-importing the samples individually / in batches, which may take a little bit of time, but you would have that overhead anyway.

How?

I’d advise to make a backup first, as you will be effectively changing all the sample slots utilised in the project, and obviously you woud have very different results if you replaced ‘KickyKick.wav’ with ‘OhYeah.wav’…

Go to the ‘Samples’ module, and select one or more Samples in the ‘Samples Slots’ table.

In the ‘Editor Actions’ group, click on the ‘Export’ button (White paper with disk icon)

This will launch a folder browser where you can define where to export the sample and settings to, e.g. \AUDIO\Drums\Kicks\

You can then reimport them back in, overwriting the Target slot, this will import the sample, retaining all your settings for Trim, Slices etc, and update the sample location. Use the ‘Target’ dropdown in the ‘Add Samples to Project’ form to define which slot the sample will be imported to. You’ll be able to quickly match the existing slot, e.g. 'Target: Flex001 KickyKick.wav" with the sample being imported, e.g. KickyKick.wav

Hope that helps / makes sense?

3 Likes
#8

Thank you very much for your detailed reply! To answer your last question: I just had a one hour OctaEdit session. It absolutly makes sense now :slight_smile: Now I even understand certain things about the octatracks organization much better.

In fact i tried my luck before even looking here in the forum again. First i just moved the samples to the desired location using the OSX Finder. Then in OctaEdit I just dragged the “correct” files from the browser to the slot with the same name, one by one. I saved the project, done. Obviously it’s the manual/exhausting way, just without using the octatrack itself, which is already a great relief. I was lucky, i just had a few files (like 30-40) in the audio pool.

So, thanks for the hint about the collect function. It is going to be my way to do it in the future. If i just had known this before :wink:

I am very happy to see that by now all the functions I need from OctaEdit do work perfect now. Won’t sell it :wink: I have to admit that I have not used it for more than half a year. Great to see, it is evolving!

2 Likes
#9

Thats good to hear :slight_smile:

You really should play around with it a bit more, there’s a lot of functionality in there, might as well enjoy the fruits of my labour and get your money’s worth, no?

#10

already did that :slight_smile: i really love the library and the manager functions. they were my reason to get it. makes preparing gigs and keeping things tidy so much easier!

2 Likes