Organising a database of sound files

As it is mentioned in the Setup of the Readme, before loading the tool, you need to have prepared a collection of (thousands of) mono and stereo buffers of max. 2 GB, hierarchically organised by category in (dozens of) folders.

To play easily with sound files, prepare one folder gathering a collection of subfolders labelled e.g. like: DL 1Kick, DM 2Snare, DH 3Hat, EL Earth, EM Water EH Fire, IL Bass, IM Gong, IH Piano, etc., containing dozens of sound files. The first two letters allow to gather together the categories of folders for each of the letter, e.g. the first letter D for Drums, E for sounds of the elements, I for instruments, and the second letter L, M, or H for e.g. a specific color or register. Thanks to these 2 letters creating virtual folders by gathering real folders, it allows to expand the choices ans selections of sound files within a sequence. The ~foldersStructure variable in the file _0_Init_Live4Life.scd allows to create virtual folders by gathering the first two letters and each (first and second) of the letters of a sound folder.

To speed up setup and creation process, I have explained the process in this repository and prepared a structured folder of a collection of sounds to download — to expand and improve — including drum machine sounds specifically sorted for this tool. This process may take a few minutes depending on the size of the sound library and your computer.

For example, for my performance Parmegiani meets SuperCollider, the Buffer module (n°7 in the Sequence View) gathered over 2 hours of recordings by Bernard Parmegiani, in this case De Natura Sonorum, Rêveries and Hell from Dante. These sound files have been cut up so as to obtain a wide variety of sounds of different durations, both isolated elements, or repeated a few times to have a brief musical phrase. The sound database has been grouped and organised hierarchically by category into about fifty files differentiating between the original tracks and my own sound categories (short / long, soft / violent elements, resembling instruments or natural elements - crackling fire, collapsing earth, wind, birds, sea – voice). During the composition process, special attention should be paid to building the sound file library and grouping sound folders (with 2 letters at the beginning) in order to easily and quickly navigate through sounds during improvisations.