Hey y'all, I'm looking for the perfect folder structure to organize all the sounds I create/record.

Do you use more specific or broad categories (e.g. "bright snares" or simply "snares")?
Do you maybe additionally use genre tags or other descriptive categories?
Do you use an organizing tool?
How do you name your sounds?

Thx in advance!

 

Hi @paulsen, I always create a folder first, then a subfolder and sometimes another subfolder. I mark WAV files as WAV and the size of the folder. with MB or GB. Then I name them so that they are clearly recognizable as my created Wav data, usually I make a name abbreviation of 2 letters behind it. I also have fantasy names like Blue 1; Blue 2 and so on.


F:\ My Samples - 70 GB - WAV

Subfolder:
- Alesis - Drum - SR-16 - WAV - 20 MB
- Samples - Vocals & Voices - WAV - 1,2 GB

Subfolder:
Kick Drum

001 Dark Kick
002 My Kick 1
003 My Kick 2

Subfolder:
Snare Drum

001 Brush Hit
002 My Snare 1
003 My Snare 2

etc.

 

For instruments, I try to stick to folders named "family - type - product name - company - license", the last three only where applicable/needed.

For example:

Perc - Xylophone - Splash Sound
Brass - Trumpet - Solo - Norrland
Brass - Trombone - Carpenter
Drum - Ethnic - Djemko - War Ensemble
Keys - Hammersmith - Soniccouture
Keys - Rhodes - EMP - Sonokinetic
Keys - Toy Piano - The Janstorp - lofiaudio
Misc - Shaker - Rain Stick
Organ - Eiersheimer
String - Bass - H#fner
String - Cello - Legato Solo Pacific
Vocal - Choir - Extended Classical
Vocal - Choir - SSO
Vocal - Solo - Clara
Wind - Ethnic - Xiao
Wind - Flute - Grbavac - CC

---

For one-shots I have a bunch of folders to broadly categorize things.

# others
808
alarm, signal, siren, alien, laser, bleep, blop
ambience, environmental, foley, drone
tom, bongo, conga
click, clap, snap, stomp, clave, wood, stick
cowbell, cymbal, crash
hat
hit, impact, boom
kick
metal, engine, industrial, mechanic
riser, sweep, whoosh, downer, braam
snare
tambourine, shaker, snare tail
vocal

I keep a separate folder for samples with round-robins / velocity layers and one for loops.

When I get a new sample pack (which is rare), I listen to all the sounds and keep only the samples I want.

----

E: For one shots, I remove "silence" at the beginning and end of files using Signet. -80dB is the threshold for "silence" in this example.

signet *.wav remove-silence --threshold -80

I convert all samples to FLAC using fd and ffmpeg

fd -eaif -ewav -j6 -x ffmpeg -y -loglevel quiet -i "{}" -map 0:a:0 -bitexact -c:a flac -compression_level 12 "{.}".flac

Note: this will also convert 32bit float WAVs to 24bit(?) fixed FLAC, so the process might be lossy some of the time for these files.

 

Last edited: May 19, 2022