Thousands. 20tb maybe. I made en excel file in order to find quickly what I need.

 

its like leftovers, you feel good twice. once when you save it, and once when you throw it away...

 

I hate kontakt but i can't live without it. I accepted my fate of having my HDDs bloated of libs.

 

I'm amazed by everyone's answers - so many libraries... where do you guys find the time to audition all the presets?

I'm a composer, sometimes record producer, sometimes song doctor, so my focus is on music, not libraries as much (also I've not scored a film in years, because Network politics repel me).

I like to keep it simple, and sharp: I've got Komplete 15 Collector's Edition, which 'weighs' 1.1TB (or more), plus whatever e-instruments I already owned (for hardware samplers but also as Kontakt Libraries) that aren't included with Komplete.

Add to that Spectrasonics and Arturia (the whole lot), plus whatever's included with Logic, and Bob's your uncle.

I did have a ton of hardware synths and samplers (33, plus my MIDI'ed Grand Piano), but all that's gone now (I live in L.A., so... yeah).

Since the fires, I've been using the Roland and Korg virtual recreations of my lost keyboards, plus of course the Arturia stuff I already owned, and some free VSTis that tried out because Korg didn't recreate my favorite Korg synth (the EX-8000 - I had two of those).

I found this dude (Björn Arlt) who makes all these very cool and very free VSTis - which changed my mind about free plugins, and VSTis. There's always at least one or two patches that are perfect for my taste - and serve the music beautifully.

So that's it really, though I've not it all installed at the same time (there's a core that I run with - the rest is project specific):

• NI Komplete 15 Collector's Edition
• Spectrasonics (OmniSphere, Keyscape)
  
• Arturia V Collection X
• Roland Cloud Ultimate
• Korg Collection 5

 

20tb? I thought I had a pretty decent loop and one-shot collection at 6tb (since the late 90s, tons of physical CDs, too). You're the GOAT

 

lol

 

i dont do samples but I am a Kontakt whore clocking in about 2.5 TB prolly another 3 tb of sample libraies for Omni /Halion/grov agent & ez / superior drummer + ez Bass play 6

 

Samples are like the supermarket: you can look at all the products, but you won't eat everything in the supermarket.
It's nice to know that's what they are.

 

About 24TB all in all. Wav and Kontakt and other stuff. All on internal drives, both spinners and SSDs.
The most important thing is to have meaningful folder names, a good structure so you can find whatever kind of thing you need.
Looking hopelessly through a massive haystack to find the needle is a total inspiration killer.

 

I don't really like using samples.. I prefer synthesizers (hardware or software), etc.. I have some samples lingering around from years ago, and I think the latest thing I grabbed (which isn't new, however) is Reverb's Drum Machines Complete Collection. I wouldn't use any loops from it (if they exist), but one hits I might use down the road, as its as close as it will get for me to trying out / using expensive vintage drum machines I'll never be able to afford! i could see myself using some of these samples in future tracks.

 

I have plenty of sample libraries. I have 2 different ways of organization for them, so I also have 2 copies of all my sample catalogue.

The 1st one is ordered by manufacturer/company names, useful to keep the original reference and backup.
The 2nd copy is organized by type of sounds, this is very useful because I don't need to depend of any VST or DAW and their own virtual folders to organize them in this way.

Also, if you wanted to create virtual folders in one music program (for example, Reason Studios DAW), then you can't open those virtual folders/categories in any other music program, so you would have to create them all over again, and every music program has its own way of file/sound organization, that's why is I am always looking to simplify the process by making this universal second file structure.
I would love to also being able to add tags and metadata to the windows file explorer (such as categories or genre) and that music programs could open those metadata, but not all of them do unfortunately.

Now, when it comes to analysing or finding new sounds (or similar samples) in your whole library, there are some sample managers that can help with that. However, the best one for me is the one that actually analyse the spectral content of the sample, instead of just reading the text metadata of the audio files, because there are also some CDDA/Audio sample libraries that doesn't even categorize their own samples, but fortunately there is a program called Sononym that helps a lot with this. It analyses the samples and can tell if it's a loop or a one-shot sample, and then it also says if it's a kick, a snare, hihat, pad, synth, atmosphere, bass, etc. And based on that you can export the data of sononym to the names of the audio file (or to its metadata) so now you can find them on any other music program.
Oh and it also has a "Similarity" function that really listens to the sample and compares it to the rest of your sample directories, it's very good to find specific sounds or for just following an specific style of sound for your music projects.
The program is not perfect but is by far the best there is for this kind of tasks as far as I know. I really wished that Spectrasonics had this same technology for their Omnisphere 2 VST, but turns out that in that plugin the "Similarity" search only looks at text metadata of it's patches/soundsources, instead of actually listening its spectral characteristics too.

I also want to mention that there are sample lybraries where the samples are inside audio tracks, and these audio tracks can have from 1 to 15 samples on every track, making the organization more complicated. There is Audacity or Reaper that searches the silent parts between the tracks so you can slice them, but the program I prefer to use for this is Waveknife.exe , its a very simple, old, and yet powerful program that allows you to slice a bunch of audio files with a volume threshold and a time of silence parameters, and it slices and exports all the audio files you want in Batch, so you can throw a whole sample library on it and in under 10 seconds or less its finished.
Then I use program Bulk Rename Editor to edit the name of all the files , and then you can put this newly sliced folder of samples to Sononym again so it tell you what is what, export the metadata and put them on their specific folders.

And that's it! At least for now, because I am still looking to organize them even more. For example, I would love to have a way to mark a sample when I already used it on a song or project, and if I did, in which project; I would like to play with a MIDI keyboard the samples, so you can change the pitch on the way, etc. Hopefully these addition are present in future releases of the music programs (or in a new one, but honestly I would like to use the least amount of programs when it comes to organization

PD: wanna find any sound or file in less than 1 second on your terabytes of files? Check the program "Everything" ;)

There is a community of sample hunters and wiki editors (people that seeks for the origin of the samples and sounds that were used in Movies, TV, shows and Videogames) that would like to check them out, so yeah pls upload them!

 

Last edited: Apr 12, 2025

Why do I feel like in an auction?

Ok, now I feel back in a Saturday night and ready to go. Thanks bro

This went straight into my heart. Love you pal

 

I have 2-3 TB Kontakt, 1 TB sample packs (incl. 480gb Elastik), 1TB other plugins that use samples incl. UVI, EZ Drumms and Bass, Omnisphere, Nexus, 500gb MPC expansions, trying to put them all on SSD & micro SD card to access them anytime

Software and sample hoarding is ain’t easy…

I try to refrain from downloading or buying more stuff

 

I periodically spend time looking through my collection, at this point I know what I have and what everything does. As far as presets go, I browse a bit every now and then, perhaps over time I may have touched every single one, but I don't rely entirely on presets. I use them to learn an instrument so I don't have to think about auditioning them all when I sit down to write.

 

I usually just have a quick look in the samples library folder, see how much is there, become overwhelmed and have a quick liedown and then watch some sports until the feeling passes...

 

Well personally I just try a few whenever I get one new in order to have an idea where or whenever I should use it. But most of the time (as 99% of us I think) I don't know them so I try several of them (ie if I'm looking for a pad ) until find something that coan work (to my ears). Of course the most experienced producers (or sound engineers in the better case) that already know what they're looking for, they can find faster (and use more properly) what they need.

 

^_^
part amateur musician and producer and part collector

Well, I must say that, to me, the most useful ones (due to my music genres) are drums (I use toontrack). I use Kontakt whenever I need strings or percussions (I use more rarely other instruments or orchestral sections).
I also find very useful Ezkeys, not just for the samples but mostly as composing tool.
I like then soft synthetizers but, since I'm not a keyboard player (on my own I can just play simple chords or melodic themes) , I use them when I need pads... or sometimes using midi phrases already compiled.

 

I've gotten rid of most of mine, I got the Komplete libraries, the Maschine ones, Ableton Suite, LABS, that kind of stuff. That just about sorts me out for whatever I need to do... you know, for those situations where you need a French horn or a harp or something.

Then there's about... I dunno, 5TB of raw samples, things I've bought throughout the years like a few sample CDs, edited material from sessions, shit ripped from films, field recordings, random experiments and whatnot.

Too much man, too much. Then again, sometimes it's just fun to get something random and start working from that for those times when I'm running otherwise empty.

 

I have all my sample libraries, Kontakt libraries and synth libraries meticulously stored with Microsoft Excel databases with full descriptions of each file for search purposes. I've been collecting for over 20 years and have about 19TB of stuff! Every drive has a back up drive too.