Making own sounds libraries

Questions
1

Hello,
I would like to start creating my own sound library to work with Supercollider. I’ve been looking around, but I see it’s a bit of a confusing topic.
Could someone tell me some ideas to create and organize my own sound libraries?
Thanks

2

Are you thinking of samples / recorded sound, synths, or something else?

3

I am thinking samples/recorded soumds

4

Depends on your needs and use cases, I guess… My approach is to record stuff, chop it up into slices in audacity or reaper, create a folder inside ~/mySamples organized by content. Next, I will symlink whatever folders I need into an audio folder inside the project folder and run this on a singleton class that holds global variables:

*loadBuffers {|path|
        server.doWhenBooted({
            var audioDirCount=0;
            buf = Dictionary.new;
            PathName((path).standardizePath).folders.do({|folder|
                buf[folder.folderName.asSymbol] = SoundFile.collectIntoBuffersMono(folder.fullPath+/+"*");
                folder.fullPath.postln;
                audioDirCount = audioDirCount + 1; 
            });
        "% audio directories loaded\n".postf(audioDirCount);
        });
    }

SoundFile.collectIntoBuffersMono is just a simple extension of the .collectIntoBuffers method of SoundFile that selects only the first channel of whatever file I throw at it.
This way, the buffers become available by their folder names. In my case, the singleton class is called BBS and I can access buffers like this:

BBS.buf[\recordingsOfMySquirrels][0].play

or whatever your samples are called.
You might also want to look into @madskjeldgaard’s PolyBuf quark, which does pretty much the same thing.

EDIT: this happens on Linux, but should work pretty much out of the box on Mac as well. Windows might be a bit more finicky, but I don’t know that platform very well…

1 Like
5

I recently discovered PathName will call .standardizePath for you, under the hood.

Class Document does the same, as well.

6

So the standardizePath call is not necessary for PathName ? Good to know!

7

In addition to that I also create folders with ‘tag names’ and create symlinks there too to find stuff faster. No need for a db other than the file system.

1 Like
8

You can try: sccode

using: search

+ code

And then, after a few searches https://sccode.org/1-5eV may help.

9

I use this class to manage loading samples from my library. My classification scheme is a bit arbitrary, but this helps to automate things, especially when I want to e.g. load a bank of samples from a folder.

This needs the Require quark.

Example:

// Root folder. 
// SAMP tries to resolve paths FIRST as an absolute path. THEN as relative to the folder of the current .scd file, THEN relaive to .root
SAMP.root = "/Users/fsc/Documents/_sounds";

// lazyLoading=true only loads files when you access them. This is faster when loading folders with many samples,
// but since sample loading takes time, it can cause errors when trying to use a sample that isn't loaded.
SAMP.lazyLoading = false;

// * is supported as a wildcard. Extensions are not required.
// This works whether or not a server is running, and samples will be automatically loaded when the server is launched.
SAMP("drum 1/*");

// Play first sample. Samples are sorted deterministically, and some basic
// numbering schemes are sorted correctly.
SAMP("drum 1/*")[0].play
Synth(\samplePlayer, args:[\buffer, SAMP("drum 1/*")[0]]);

// When a string is used to access a sample, the first sample with
// the string anywhere in it's name is returned. This will match
// "clap.wav", "drums-clap.wav", "01-clap-quiet.aiff", etc.
// * works as a wildcard, but only the first match is returned.
SAMP("drum 1/*")["clap"].play;

// Channels arg will force loading only some channels of a file.
// This is equivalent to Buffer.readChannel(channels:(0..n-1))
SAMP("counterstrike/*", channels:1)[0].play;

// Display a UI with all samples. Clicking can preview, dragging
// produces a sclang string to load the sample. Note that this does
// not work well with lazyLoading=true, because samples are loaded 
// only after being accessed the first time.
SAMP("drum 1/*").gui