I’ve just rearranged all my samples/instruments/songs/recordings/vsts on disc. I was just wondering how you guys managed yours. Do you differentiate between filetypes, or do you lump complete xrni in amongst wav files? Do you sort by quality, length, sound etc, or just purely by function (ie, bass, drums, synths)? What about soundfonts, if you have any? Where do yours go.
Purely curious 
Purely by function. Even then I use aliases too much (on osx) when something has more than one function. Having a drum folder with tonal bassdrums in it and then a symlink to you basses folder and stuff like that. Differentiating between filetypes (I used to), quality, length I think is abstracting it too much…well for me anyway.
I have all of my samples in one folder, organized in a very haphazard way. They are first divided into “Audio” and then “Loops,” with a third folder called “To Be Processed.” In my Audio folder I have a number of different, weird categories, like “Drum Hits,” “Freesound Project,” “Obama Swearing Samples” and “Casio VL-Tone.” I also have a folder called “Personal Samples” which are samples I’ve recorded and cut up myself.
The problem is that I started making computer music with Reason and so my Samples are kept in my “Reason Projects” folder. So, when I’m using Renoise or Logic, I still go to my Reason folder to find the samples I plan to use. It’s clumsy, but since I’ve been using it this way for so long, it’s hard to change or reorganize.
I have some drum samples in folder “sorted drums” and a bit of samples wandering on my disc. When I need something I always remember where I left it, so there’s no problem
PS - Generally I prepare new set of samples for each track so I have no need to organize samples on my disc more than now
i gave up this some time ago. i realized, no matter how i organize things, it will never be “perfect”. but of course, half-way is better than complete chaos.
as long as I know roughly where to find stuff i need, i’m satisfied. but there’s one thing i’ve always been very strict about, and that is to never mix up folders of royalty-free and not-free samples
i only visit my “pirate samples” folder when i absolutely need it and then i make sure to give em a real fuck-over.
You make a good point there: I don’t differentiate between free and non-free samples…actually, I’m not sure which of those samples are and aren’t free. Oops 
Anyway, lastnight I finished moving everything from “one big directory with a few hap hazard subdirectories” into my new structure. I now have a loops samples in seperate folders. My samples directory contains wav/xi/xrni etc all together. It is structured as so:
./Bass
./Drum Kits
./FX
./Guitar
./Keys
./Misc
./Orchestral
./Pads
./Perc
./Roland C3
./Single Cycle Waveforms
./VOX
with each one of those directories being split up, eg I split bass into acoustic, electric, synth. And then for example electric is split into slap, fingerstyle, pick etc etc etc.
Is that too OCD? It’s already come in pretty helpful. But things like the Roland C3 directory throw everything off… BAH.