A Trial That Worked - Sample Librarian

Sometimes a free trial period is really all you need.

The Problem

Over the years, the audio library has grown quite large. Between the music, ambience, and sound effects files I have available to use on the show, my “sounds” folder is up to almost 60,000 files and over 2,000 folders. Usually while working on an episode I would open up 3 different instances of Windows Explorer: one for music, one for ambience, and one for sfx. From there, I would use the search feature to find a particular track. For sfx, this meant searching for various words that I thought might be used for the effect I was looking for and playing a ton of sound files back to back in VLC. For music and ambience, it usually meant going to the artists website, using their own filter system to find and preview tracks, then searching for that track in the main folder.

With so many files to sift through, this started to really slow down the entire process of producing an episode. The search itself was slow to load everything in, especially when it came to looking for sfx. Opening so many files in rapid succession would crash VLC probably once every hour or so. And on the worst days, all of these instances of Windows Explorer and the search function running together on top of everything else would just crash Windows Explorer too.

I knew there had to be a better way. I knew that there was no way industry professionals dealt with this. So I began working the Google magic.

A Whole New Type of Program

The searches started with figuring out how people organize and catalog their audio files, especially for something like movies or audio dramas. That lead me to the term “Audio Sample Library Manager.” Most of what I found was older or out of budget professional level software, but there were some promising modern alternatives. However, one thing I was trying to avoid was a monthly subscription. I already have a number of subscriptions for the show, and I didn’t think I really needed a monthly payment for something that is really just running locally on my computer.

These pieces of software are great, even if you aren’t needing to filter through tens of thousands of samples and instead just want to organize a music collection. They are able to tag files so they can be searched for with more than just the file name. All of the ones I looked at also index the audio into a single window or folder structure, so no more bouncing between windows to find something.

While these did not work for me, a couple that grabbed my attention early on were Soundly and Sononym. Soundly has a very modern interface, but it has a lot of web and cloud tie in’s that force it to require a subscription (if you have over 2500 local files). Sononym looked very interesting to me because I was curious if it would be able to use its AI training to find whole songs that are similar, not just short samples. Ultimately, the price tag was more than I was ready to drop with this being the first time I’ve even heard of this type of program. I ended up choosing a program called Sample Librarian.

Discovering Sample Librarian

There were a couple of things that led to this choice. First and foremost, it offered a free 30 day trial. I was able to try things out without fully committing to something long term. Considering this was a whole new type of software for me, this drew me in because I wasn’t sure how it would work with my workflow. On top of the free trial, Sample Librarian is an affordable one time purchase ($33) for the full license. Since I am doing everything locally with my own local files, I really feel that the other programs with a subscription weren’t going to offer enough to be worth the cost of a subscription. I want to acknowledge that Sononym also has a free trial and a one time purchase, but is $100 for the full license, which is more than I was wanting to spend on software I’ve never used before. Perhaps I will revisit them later.

Set up was simple. I have a few folders that I put all of the sounds that I can use in the show into and I just had it scan those folders for files. After a few moments, I had list of all of the folders and their subfolders that I could quickly move back and forth through, no more 3+ windows of File Explorer open, just one program. Sample Librarian can also preview the files right in the program, so I am no longer having to opening things in VLC and dealing with it crashing on me. Sample Librarian also has the ability to tag and sort your files, as well as a search feature that will quickly search all of the imported files, so again, no more waiting on the sluggish File Explorer search. I can also drag the files I need directly from Sample Librarian into Hindenburg Journalist (my audio editor). This was already how my workflow went, but the fact it was just as seamless as I was used to was another massive benefit.

The trial ended up mutually beneficial. I got to spend a full month learning how to use Sample Librarian and integrating it into my workflow for a full episode. When the trial ended, the decision was made. I tried to return to the way I handled the sound design for the show once my trial license ran out and kind of hated everything about it. Everything I used to do before was just so much easier using Sample Librarian that I knew I had to pay for the full license. And I did.

It’s Not All Sunshine

While I may be gushing a bit over how happy I am to be using Sample Librarian, I do want to point out that it does have some things that aren’t great.

The search may be very fast and has a couple different ways to filter it, it always searches everything. I wish I could have it search just the selected folder and subfolders. For example, if I am looking for an ambient track and search for “tavern” I have 73 different tracks with “tavern” in the name between different versions of the same track with some being songs and others being ambiences.

Folders are also weird to get into. Every folder in the side bar has a special folder option titled “All from here” which is how you browse everything in the folder and subfolders. One the one hand, it is great that it is an option, on the other, it feels weird to need to have that instead of just a way to view everything from clicking the main folder.

It is possible that this might be an issue on my end, I would have expected that at least some of my files are already tagged, however none of them show up in the tagged sections by default. This means that while I hope to one day be able to search for certain types of tracks easier using tags, it is going to take me a long time to manually tag everything and come up with enough tags to make this feature useful.

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