Sample organization
With completing all recording and sequencing on my next album and me regaining my enthusiasm for making new music, a complete sample library reset is in order. I'm a sample hoarder but my current setup (30-40 gigs of loops and samples in d:\music\samples\ subdirectories) has always been awful. The hierarchy's all wrong and it sucks to browse. For a long time I've wanted a del.icio.us tagging style sample browser but I understand it's a limited market.
But lately I've been using the latest beta of foobar2000 for my mp3 listening and organization. One thing I totally love about it is the facet view:
You can enter a search query or click in any of the panels (you can choose what tag you want each facet to be based on) and it narrows down the other panels based on your selection or search query. It's really fantastic and makes it easy to explore your collection.
So a light bulb went off last night: this is exactly what I want for my samples! With some help from the foobar2000 forums I set up another copy of foobar and had it index my sample directories. Big problem: foobar saves all the metadata to the actual audio files -- .WAV files don't support genre metadata. Boned.
I've been scrabbling around trying to make foobar do what I want with various plugins but it's a pain in the ass. Now I'm on to trying other media players...