Yeah, this is how I work - one project per song, samples stored in project.
I use the Audio folder for shared stuff - drum samples, chains, etc. This tends to be stuff I’ve copied directly onto the card rather than sampled in during the songwriting process.
Hadn’t noticed the collect samples option, might have to start using that!
So I’m not alone! That’s pretty much what I figured out would be best practice for my workflow too. On top of this, the “collect samples” feature makes sure I won’t delete/modify any material that’s also part of some other project.
Centralised location where the samples are available to all Projects within the Set.
Make copies.
No! I use project folder option, and Audio Folder for usual stuff, collect sample if needed.
I don’t create subfolders in the project.
The way I see it the “convenience” of the pool is just so your samples are available to all projects in the set. I see “collect samples” as a way to make your project self contained for export, say you want to give a project to a friend it’ll be all there for them, but you still have the samples available to all your projects in the set because it copied instead of moved. Or you just are way more concerned about your main project and don’t want to backup everything so you collect samples and backup for a tidy not too large backup. If one really wanted to have them all per project you can just do that straight away and never even put them in the pool. If you do decide you want to “collect samples” for a project in a set and don’t need them in the pool anymore you just delete them. If collect samples moved instead of copied one might inadvertently pull samples from the pool that other projects are using if they haven’t meticulously kept track of everything, and then those projects wouldn’t work.
Just for the fun of it I’ll mention that I’ve never even had to make decisions about this. All my OT projects over the last 4 1/2 years use a total of about 3 or 4 saved samples between them and I never save and reuse recorder buffers. 
I have to feed audio into it to have it make sound, all my patterns are made out of recorder buffer placeholders! 
That’s exactly what I’m after but I still want to know and make sure I remember what my projects are about and how I need to operate the framework I built, because when I hit “play”, most of the time nothing really happens, some sounds might play every once in a while and that’s all… So having everything gathered together helps a lot in identifying what my intention was in the first place. I’m also a professional musician, sound engineer and a photographer, I can work on electronic music for 6 months and then all of sudden get work in photography for another 6 months or do FOH for a band for 2 more months… when I get back to e-music it’s incredibly helpful to have a well-organised, comprehensive environment so I can pick up the projects where I left them without wasting too much time learning everything all over again. This way of preparing the workflow even before I seriously start committing creative work has been a live saver more than once.
I think that’s one of the “my convenience isn’t your convenience” situations. I, for myself, find it much more convenient to have all samples used in a project in the project folder itself (like the OP).
How the hack would you make self contained project backups otherwise? Always remember to collect the samples first before making a backup? I know myself too well, that this will fail more often than not … 
This. In my case there are sometimes even years in between.
I saw that coming 
You tee’em up, I knock em down
You monster…
Thats really strange. I’m always pleasantly surprised that if I turn on my Octa, load a random project and a random bank, everything sounds as it did before. Only exception being if I’m running midi to my Monomachine, but I typically record my Monomachine into the Octa and save it if it’s a part I particularly like.
Perhaps you’re not saving samples from the rec buffers? Perhaps you have a lot of midi tracks going to other external gear?
You trained your OT to be a Cannibal? OM-F-G, is that even legal?
No, not at all. First, I’m not using the midi sequencer of the OT. I don’t need it really, I use the one from the Digitone and I don’t need much more. Maybe one day I will, but most synth parts are played live, eventually live-sampled on the OT but not necessarily. Second, I have other devices that run sequences too. Much of what I do in the OT is produced live on the spot. On its own, a OT project doesn’t produce much sound in my configuration. Like @Open_Mike I need to “feed” it with live-produced material and almost never save the recording buffers. Sources can be synths, guitar, bass guitar, resampling, on-the-spot field-recordings… all this can evolve, of course but as of today that’s how the OT fits in my set-up.
Animoog is a great synth, I use it too. I’ll take a look at the others mentioned there…thanks for the link
I think I had the answer I was seeking in this topic, but I’d like to be sure.
Forgive the question, but I’m still walking on eggs shells with the Octatrack and I have a gig to play soon with it.
I’m now adapting some tunes of one of my band made in my computer (NI Maschine) to the Octatrack. So I exported many samples and put them the in the set dedicated to this band.
But these samples are specific to theses tracks and most of them won’t be used again in future projects.
Si I have many samples in the pool that are not relevant for future compositions I’ll make with the Octatrack and I’d like to remove them and put them in a specific subfolder without searching them again in each machine.
If I do a “collect samples” function, will these samples be copied in each project audio folder and I’ll be able to delete them from the root of the pool ? The machines will find them in the new place ?
Thanks for the answer.
“Collect samples” just works for the current active project (it doesn’t touch any other project).
So if a sample is used in two projects and you perform “collect samples” only on one of them and delete it from the global pool, the second project won’t find it anymore.
Thanks a lot. That’s what I had understood, but no matter : these samples I’m talking about are specific to each project.
That’s why I don’t want to keep them at the root of the pool.