Your workflow for sampling sessions?

Guys, I wanted to sit down with my new Maschine Plus and sample stuff I have been piling up over the past weeks. Then I realised that it doesn’t allow access to the file structure and because of that I don’t know how to build a personal library of samples/chops that I can go back to.

Is there perhaps a way to save my recorded samples with the user library and tag them into a certain category so I can return to them later, e.g. a horn sound or drum break I want to reuse later and outside of the project I sampled it into.

I have to say as much as I like the tagging system for libraries, having it as the only option on the hardware is limiting. Any ideas how to go about it...?

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ozon

Very good question.

AFAIK there’s no way to organize samples on the M+. You have to copy your projects to the computer, tag the samples, organize them into directory structures in your User Content directory and copy back onto the M+.

If there’s a better workflow, I’d love to know as well.

Jean Voyage

Oh man if this is the only way the M+ turns out to be more of a content consumption machine than I was hoping…

D-One

It depends on how you sample, if you do it thru the Line-Ins then all your Samples are in SD/Native Instruments/Maschine 2/Recordings, so you can just add that path to the Maschine-Desktop and tag them there on the PC, directly to the SD. Tags are stored inside wav files.

Tagging as a whole is simply not available in standalone mode, as well as alternatives like moving files to particular folders, apparently, file management is some sort of rare luxury.

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/26914#Comment_26914

Indeed... Altho this seems to be what most consumers want nowadays the standalone niche always seemed to me to be quite the opposite, usually people who value custom content, particularly in terms of samples 🤷‍♂️

The most user-friendly way IMO is to do it all from the computer and then just copy it over to the SD, it kind of defeats part of the purpose of owning a standalone in the first place. 🤷‍♂️🤷‍♂️

Jean Voyage

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/26996#Comment_26996

Thanks for your input! I guess I will just have to resort to saving files to my computer and re-recording them from there. Automating the process will not work because I will also have samples in the Recordings folder that I do not want to show up in my library, because they are project specific. Not what I was hoping for, but it is what it is I guess.

NI, if you are reading this: This does not solve my problem, it’s just a workaround that is far from frictionless. What you should do is allow users to designate a folder on the SD from which they can import and assign tags like on the computer with the access to the file system. Sampling and working with samples is so much fun on the Maschine, managing samples unfortunately isn’t and is worse because of the lack of access to file system features. Even Apple is coming around on iPhone and iPad, please do so as well.

darkwaves

Browse loops or samples: Maschine2 > Projects > Pick the project name. My samples are there with the silly timestamp filenames. So if I were in your position, I'd create a project name that would indicate some sort of 'sampling session'. I'd save the project before doing anything else. Import/record samples, chop or whatever, maybe save groups/sounds and finally save the project with samples. I'd assume you could do the same with groups and sounds.

In my case, I'd be far more likely to just spend some time recording a bunch of audio loops from some instrument (hardware or software). Create a project called "Keys Loops". Record a bunch of rhodes loops. When it's time to use them in a project, you can browse the way I mentioned above. They'll be in a folder called "Keys Loops Samples"

Kind of funny. I used the new option to rename a sample. If I go browse for it immediately, I only see the timestamp file names in that folder even though I renamed the samples Loop 1 and Loop 2. Switching to storage mode does show my new filenames in the folder:

Disconnecting from my computer; M+ now shows the file names I expect. So you probably need to re-scan the SD card. Feature request: Re-scan the file during the rename process.

Other than re-scan issue; I think this workflow would get you pretty close to what you want. No tagging from the hardware, but you can have a logical organization scheme that will make it pretty trivial to find again. I've not tried it, but you kind of have to assume it would also work if you saved the group.

Tagging on the computer becomes trivial too. Chop up a drumkit. Truncate your chops. Rename the samples to kick, snare, snare 2, etc. Easy enough to find on M+. Switch to storage mode when you have nothing better to do. Add the SD card to your library, select all files you called "Snare" and tag them.

For testing; I added the folder from my SD Card to the library in the software (as opposed to the whole SD card). It's showing D in the above screenshot and G below. I put the card in an SD reader on my computer and took this time to go through and clean up some of the garbage I've recorded in the past few years. That's the only reason it's showing up with a different drive letter.

That alias is easy to go find in library. Feature Request: Why is this truncated. lol

...and now tagging is trivial. I'm not going through the 8k files on my SD card:

These tags are embedded into the files. My two loops are now tagged when I switch back to M+

Jean Voyage

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/27090#Comment_27090

Thanks. This is so convoluted, but really, thank you for taking the time. It’s not really a feasible solution because I don’t always want to keep a computer around.

I have decided that despite the fact that I really like the interface for chopping, I think it’s best to move on to another Maschine for my standalone needs (or maybe just . I will maybe keep th M+ around for a while to see what NI makes of it, but currently it’s like an Apple device that only lets me use the stock apps (I also couldn’t figure out how to use my Kontakt patches and the timestretching works like it’s 1999).

Frankly it’s a bit disappointing and I can‘t believe that few design choices that NI made in order to restrict user freedom in favor of their content packs would ruin the experience for me.

D-One

Frankly it’s a bit disappointing and I can‘t believe that few design choices that NI made in order to restrict user freedom in favor of their content packs would ruin the experience for me.

Same, the fact that the M+ is an adapted version of a computer software instead of something built from the ground up contributes a lot to those restrictions.

NI is pretty clueless when it comes to user's desires and expectations about managing/accessing their own content so they don't limit it on purpose to sell expansions but I do agree that that's what it looks like. IMHO there will be no improvements for this stuff anytime soon so I wouldn't keep the M+ based on those hopes, I could be wrong tho, up to you.

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