How Do You Organize Your Sample Library?

I did a quick search and couldn’t find a topic like this, so here we go! How do you organize and name your samples?

As for me, I use a simple folder structure with categories like BASS, PADS and LEAD. The subfolders are categorized pretty randomly. The sample names are also pretty random. I’m planning to do a somewhat more organized restructure so I thought I would get some ideas from you guys.

I re-organise mine every 6 months or so. At the moment, I’ve got them split out like this -
Acapellas
Break Creation - Contains single hits, tunes to sample and sample packs. Categorised by genre - so easy to navigate using the Renoise browser.
Drum Programming - separate folder for drum patterns and examples from things done over the years.
Movie/Tv Samples/Incoming - Library of samples and to be sampled.

That’s what works for me! It can be a pain to sort everything out, but when it’s done your work-flow will be easier!

Folder structure. On the top level I have folders organized by licence, like “free”, “unknown”, “CC BY 3.0”, “not free”.
Inside each of those folders, I have “samples”, “soundfonts”, and “XRNIs”

Inside those, there are folders like “lead”, “perc”, “pad”, “fx”, etc. but also some unorganized stuff like folders named after the source I got it from, or licence textfiles etc.

But actually I’m not satisfied with this and plan to do a major re-organization. :lol:

I have root folders with “170”, “140”, and so on - respectively for bpm.

i have this gigantic samples/ folder with loads of subfolders. mind you, i’ve got pretty much all my samples from 1999 onwards in there. mostly in random folders, but renoise has made it easier to organize them, especially with the expanded diskbrowser-mode. i still wish i could just drag a wavefile to a new folder, within renoise, but have had to grow used to clicking on “show in Finder” instead and doing it outside Renoise.