Just managed to grab a great 1 year old Octatrack, which has taken place next to my Rytm. Just starting to load sample onto the CF card and want to start by getting organized so I don’t just end up with a big long list in the audio pool. My samples on my Mac are organized by BPM and key, but not so relevant right with pitch shifting and time stretching. Was thinking of creating folders on the CF card such as kicks, snares, synth, vocal etc.
Anyone care to suggest their preferred way of organizing samples for use on the OT?
In one of the project menus there’s an option for how the OT displays your sample names. I’m not in front of a manual or box ATM.
In terms of loading samples, I usually dump about 60-70 samples into the pool (static). Then turn on slots and play the OT like an MPC. Turns 8 tracks into lots of tracks. Just an idea…
Not to derail, but when I first got my OT I loaded a bunch of samples on the CF card. Now I have a very long list of samples to scroll through and am thinking about reorganizing them into more manageable categories. If i do this on the computer, I’m concerned that the OT won’t be able to find those samples in my existing projects. Is this the case, or is there a good way to do this?
Accent your suspicions are correct. If you move the samples to a different folder then the OT can’t see them any more and wont load them into the tracks. Unfortunately I haven’t found a good way to organize files in the OT. It seems you have to start off well organized and keep it tidy as you progress.
That is a real shame. I could be wrong, but my impression is that Rusty’s work would have gotten around this, but Elektron’s silence has made this impossible. If only there was a “collect all and save” option like there is in Ableton Live, it seems like it could be worked around.
You can, per pg 31 of the manual, COLLECT SAMPLES which copies samples that are used by the currently active project into the
project directory, which will effectively disconnect the project from the audio pool.
HP…halfplaybacks…complete mixes, no vocals…
FP…full playbacks…complete mixes
CH…for sample chains…single waveforms and specific single sounds…like CH kiks A…organised in beatmatched rows…
SP…song parts…here a got single xtra subfolders each containing all single stems of a certain track…KIK xxxA120, SN xxxA120…place always the tempo at the end of all file names…so ot won’t start guessing and the days of organizing by tempo are over…
LP…for all pre fixed loops …separated subfolders again…like… SI…single instruemnts…DR…drumloops…and so on…
BP…bits and pieces…
if you organize your stuff with clear and short beginnings and straight capitols here and there, you can always overlook your pool pretty easily…
in the beginning all this sucks a bit…but you’re doin’ right, by asking yourself right from the start…if you structure it straight and get used to your certain kind of system, it pushes you forward big time…
Well, it’s sitting there in an alpha stage, unfortunately the main issue relates to the risk of corrupt projects, and a few other minor quibbles, due to the OS…
Theres only so much I can do given the base/target, and at the moment my Octatracks are out on loan with friends.
Yes, we need some reorganisation tool. It’s only limiting the usefulness of the Octatrack if not.
IMHO nobody is wise enough to start with an indeal concept of sorting or categorizing samples - be it on the CF or for the slots. When I start with a project, I follow inspiration, record sample after sample, and allways end up with a slot assignment that is somehow sub-optimal. I would like to have something to rearrange the slots - and the samples on the CF.
Hi, I am new here and am planning to buy an OT next week. I have been wondering about this same issue. I use a lot of chord progressions in my music so here is an example of some file names I came up with:
Dm Bmd5 Csm 01.wav
Dm Bmd5 Csm 02. wav (01 and 02 mean the same part in different octaves)
Dm Bmd5 Csm bass.wav
Dm Bmd5 Csm strings.wav
Obviously Dm = D Minor. Bmd5 = B minor diminished 5th. Csm = C Sharp Minor.
The advantage here is that I know the chord progression right away instead of just the key, meaning I can more easily come up with new melodies in the moment. Often I use non-scale tones in a chord as a passing tone or chromatic neighbor note, so knowing the scale is not always enough.
The downsides might be that all parts which start with Dm chord will appear near each other, even if they are from different songs. Meanwhile if there is a second section to this song that starts with a G chord, it will show up farther away from this first part in alphabetical order. I suppose coming up with a prefix for each song would fix that.
As far as drum loops go, I plan to be more improvisational with those, so I don’t need a strict organizing scheme. I can just kind of label them by genre.
Obviously I don’t really know how well any of this will work since I haven’t used an OT yet, so any thoughts are welcome.
I would say, expect to get it wrong.
Obviously being organised is good, but until you’ve used the OT for a while you won’t really know how you want to use it, which makes it hard to know how best to organise your samples.
Myself, I now load very few samples in to a new project, just a few fundamentals (basic percussion sounds.) Everything else ends up being sampled in externally. That’s not how I thought I’d use the OT, but it’s where I am.
Also, you’re quite likely to find that you want to use sample chains, which is really a different kind of sample organisation altogether but very useful on the OT.
I organized my sample library on my computer before loading them all into the OT.
What made sense for me was to split things into basic categories; I’m doing this from memory but more or less it looks like this:
Drums
Kicks
Snares
Cymbals
Toms
Percussion
Synths
Synths
Pads
Chords
FX
Waveforms
Bass
Loops
Sample Packs
In each sub-folder, I always include a AAA folder, which includes my favorite samples from that section.
I really don’t use very many loops, otherwise that sections would be more fleshed out.
The Sample Packs folder is just a place to keep all the stuff I haven’t gotten around to organizing into the rest of the sample folder structure, or that I’m not sure about. I probably should just take the time to organize them all, but I’ve downloaded a lot of sample packs recently and spent HOURS breaking everything out to work in this format.
While this thread got bumped from the dark (trinity) ages, this little nugget is a good pro-tip that I should take advantage of. I’m generally fairly organized with my samples when loading them to OT, but once I start resampling and live sampling, stuff just gets a little jumbled. I also have to try that trick of loading 60-70 samples into the pool right away. If I’m reading that right, it might be a nice way to have a short library for quick ideas, just to get started.
