So, just out of curiosity...Did your search for samples and sample libraries end yet or are you looking for new samples all the time.If you think your search is near complete, what products did you settle for and why?What do you use most often?

 

Last edited: Apr 24, 2026 at 2:15 PM

To be honest, I would pay someone to go through my sample library and nuke the nonsense out of there.

The search is never-ending, because I don't sample instruments, so I can't quite gather a good set of the stuff I use and say "I'm done".

Rather I mostly use samples for weird FX, random sounds, speeches, stuff from popular media, something with a message mostly, or at least auditory interest.

And I can always use some more of that.

When I die, bury me in my hard drive collection. By time time I'm dead, you probably won't have to use any soil to bury me.

 

i only store high quality samples. anything that sounds off or low quality gets deleted. the same with plugins both effects and instruments

only the best possible. its about quality.. also i dont collect large size libraries anything over 90 gigabyte for example kontakt library usually gets deleted too.. its better to have smaller libraries. also.... also... i always look for new stuff for the sake of interest

 

I don’t audition samples in isolation.

I pick sounds inside the track. Whether something sounds “good” on its own is irrelevant. What matters is whether it works once everything is playing. A kick can sound awful by itself and be exactly right in the mix. Same goes for everything else.

Spending hours auditioning samples in isolation or building a perfectly curated personal library is, in my opinion, a waste. You are investing time into decisions you are very likely going to undo once real context shows up. You are listening to stuff that has about a 90% chance it will never get used and nearly as likely to just get deleted.

That is the sunk cost fallacy in action.

I would rather stay in the session and make decisions where they actually matter. I grab a pack, break it apart, and throw it into a few broad folders by use. Drums and percussion, vocals, bass, FX. MIDI and presets get the same treatment. Artwork, demo spam, and all the other content get deleted immediately.

Loopcloud offline in your DAW makes auditioning samples in context of the track streamlined.

 

I recently bought some real drum samples from https://yurtrock.com/ was the ultimate pack on sale. And got FromMars drum Maschine samples also. It made me then sit and clean up all my drum samples and reorganise. So now I have a more clean library but also a better sense of where what is.
So there might be truth to the thing about not listening in isolation, but some sounds I just flat out did not like and also just knowing what I have in better detail and where to find it makes it easier when I want to find a specific type of sound. Otherwise there was that plugin called Drum Slot that gives random drum sounds from your library that could also be a great thing. Will have to install that again now I think of it

 

There is a difference between being organized and being a micromanager of every sample. I have about 10 or less main category folders, and I have each one set as a Sidebar item in the MacOS finder (same basic idea as file explorer). Those 10 Main folders have all my extracted packs in their original folders. I like to keep them in their original folder, and the same directory structure within them; so I do not have samples which I do not know where they came from at some later date. Within Loopcloud, I have scanned everything in those 10 main folders into its library, and the packs inside those are available in the same folder structure as how they sit on that disk. It automatically scans for changes either automatically or just whenever you want it to.

In Loopcloud, clicking into one main folder already gets the other 9 out of my way. I can filter that way, and then in the main "results" pane, the information there can be sorted by bpm, root key, etc. It lets you set the BPM and key of your DAW project and then lock those parameters. So after that, any auditioned sample is automatically transposed and stretched to tempo. You know what it is going to work like in your track. You can either use Loopcloud as a sampler (almost) and trigger the sample with Midi, or your can just drag it out like any folder on your computer.

I've tried basically every sample manager application that I know of, certainly all the major ones most people use. There's always some kind of dealbreaker in them, no matter how good the rest is. I haven't run into one in Loopcloud yet and I've been using it at least a year by now.
Sorry for the PSA but a great sample manager used to be my white whale.

 

No, I've never used a sample in my life.

 

BIG thumb up!

 

I suppose if you don't create real music and just make "beats", then the sound is all you have to play with.

 

Yeah, it's not like sound can contain music. Shit, it doesn't even have notes!

 

Very rarely search for samples unless it’s from one of the following:
It’s a Maschine pack, the whole thing of all expansions counts as a nice big sample library in the future
It’s a sample used in a popular media source like a game or movie and/or associated with that sample source
(had gotten both gigapack discs from last year because I saw the familiar cover and remembered they’d been used somewhere)
It’s a native instruments library or one of the companies that I have a bunch of libraries like soniccouture, Strezov, etc.
(I don’t just pick random libraries with gigabytes grr I naturally trim my selection)
It’s in my samples folder already

 

A person is till they stop. But yeah, some never stop. No one ever stops. If there is no sanity check involved and storage is not an issue, you are hopeless. There's my 2 cents to the universe today.

 

Last edited: Apr 24, 2026 at 5:58 PM

I think the part of us that likes hearing the branches/trees/leaves and birds/creek/wind in the woods/nature has been in this case "cracked" by the actual audio files we can play in our caves without exposing to a danger.

But it also seams that the level of our resonance with the sounds itself might be calibrated by hearing the danger itself, so if we eliminate it we cant really distinguish a good sample from the bad.

Just kidding, total nonsense but who knows.

I just dont understand, sometimes i hear one of the 909 sample packs on my drive, i hear that it sucks but i wont delete it...maybe there will be some really crappy track where it will fit really good. lol

maybe that´s why THE DUDES only have 20-30 kicks and not 300 like the internet producers

 

The second anyone fires up Kick3, they have more than 300 kicks available to them instantly. The minute you install the Roland Cloud Legendary machines and all the expansions, you probably have 300 available to you just there. Kontakt users who fire up the Drumlab library have more than 300 kicks available to them. There are likely that many kicks just in the Vengeance Essential Clubsounds packs alone.
Even Falcon Drum Machine Designer has over 100 kick drum samples in it.

Most people I know who have expensive hardware like an original TR-909 or TR-808, or even the neglected "lesser" model machines in their home studios have collections of the individual hits from them. Only a moron fires up a vintage drum machine worth thousands of dollars every time they need a kick drum. I know since I added the Zulu SD disk drives to my E-MUs each one of them has well over the supposed 300 guideline you have mentioned available to load in seconds.

If you actually build your kicks from almost scratch, you need 3 samples. A click, a body, and a tail. Cute little digs like this have certainly become popular with "internet producers", but the irony of that is all it shows is someone not knowing what they are talking about. "I SAW IT IN A VIDEO!", as if those people do not have crazy amounts of content they actually hide from anyone watching their videos. How gullible can you be?

gullible:
Gullible (pronounced /ˈgʌləbəl/) describes a person who is easily tricked, cheated, or persuaded to believe untruths due to being overly trusting or naive. Characteristics include a lack of skepticism, innocence, and vulnerability to manipulation. It likely originates from the verb "gull" (to swallow/deceive), often applied to those who "swallow stories whole"

 

Last edited: Apr 24, 2026 at 7:29 PM

For my last track, I spent weeks trawling old television shows, radio shows, comedies and records. I ended up with far too many samples, and that part of my brain that likes tidy things was overruled by my tenacity to hoard.

 

to be honest I deleted vast majority of sample instruments and mostly using own AI to generate samples nowadays

 

I'm searching for Organ Sounds (Wersi OAS, OAX). UVI Retro Organ Library has some nice vintage Eminent Organ Sounds and there are some Yamaha D-85 Sounds for Kontakt around, but Wersi Sounds are hard to find. The old discontinued Live-Styler Software has a bunch of them. Kiev Sampling made also a very nice library of a Yamaha Keyboard.

 

What about the insane redundancies with the billions of garbage sample packs spewed out every day? I swear if I see one more 808, 303, or "drum kit" sample pack I'm going to lose it. 95% of the shit in these packs are the same and/or just junk.

 

Do you own one of the instrument you have as your avatar on here?