I love doing field recordings, and then converting these samples in to individual sounds for use in Renoise. One thing I do NOT love, though, is the process of taking what is usually a single take with a bunch of samples, loading this in to, what I use now, Audacity, and then manually copy/pasting out the sounds (this can be upwards of 100 different samples), so as you can imagine, this is a mind numbingly boring redundant task.
What I’d like to be able to use is some piece of software … ideally I could set a threshold, almost like how a noise gate works, and then anything between those gaps would be automatically split and exported as an individual WAV file.
Is there anything that does something like this?
Any tips on speeding up the field recording => sampling => sequencing process?
when i decided to export my Reason Refills to use the sounds in Renoise, i made tracks in Reason with just each drumbeat in succession. needless to say, i ran into the same time-consuming sample-split process. i used Sony’s Soundforge to remedy this. it allows you to set ‘sectors’, and has an option to export each ‘sector’ to a seperate wav. works perfectly, and you can let it auto-detect as well and set the parameters and stuff.
Sounds like you want something that does transient detection.
Assuming you are on Windows try giving wavosaur a try. It’s a small, portable, stand alone, freeware audio editor.
It can do basic transient detection (Tools -> Slicing/Region -> Auto slice region). Results may vary depending on the transients in your samples. Then you can do File -> Export -> Export regions to export each slice as a seperate wav file.
It can also do nifty automatic region detection / silence removal / trimming.
Again, these seem to be ‘basic’ implementations so it would really depend upon your samples.
i’m not sure, was a while back when i did that. if you check out the answer by mxb, it seems wavosaur has the same functionality, for free. might want to try that out myself as well.
thanks again, all! I did a trial run with WaveKnife and it worked great. Nothing like saving hours of time and cutting out the most boring part of the ‘new track’ process.
Just for the benefit of any Mac users who peek into this thread, Audiofinder does this and much, much more. Process -> Sample Extractor. One of many reasons I love this tool.
Also, if you’re really into hardcore sample management batch processing 100s of samples (e.g you are Goldbaby), Audiofile Engineering’s Sample Manager is worth a look. That can automate all sorts of tasks, from volume normalization to batch-processing with Audio Units or VSTs to file naming conventions to uploading the finished file(s) to Soundcloud.
