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Best way to make use of Samples From Mars on the iPad?

krassmannkrassmann
in General App Discussion

This black Friday I bought all of the Samples From Mars and now I wonder how to make use of them on the iPad.

For the instruments the obvious choice might be to import them into AudioLayer. But how to do that efficiently without moving the wav files around? Best would be a bulk import of a whole directory tree but I struggled with that with AudioLayer. Did anyone find a good solution? Is there any iOS app that can import one of the drumkit formats used by SfM? In both cases, recreating the instruments or drumkits sample by sample would be quite some work.

Comments

  • AlmostAnonymousAlmostAnonymous

    Is he still distributing them with exs24 files? If so, just import that into AudioLayer.

  • krassmannkrassmann

    As I said, AudioLayer can import the EXS files nicely but there are some problems. I can only successfully import a single EXS instrument and couldn’t import multiple EXS instruments by making use of the “+import folder” function. That also means I have to recreate the SfM folder structure manually. Moreover I have to prepare a certain file structure by moving the folders that contain the wav files into the folder with the EXS files. For the latter I could write a little bash script to do that but manually it would be quite a monkey job.

  • tahichetahiche

    Been there!.
    In my experience there’s 2 totally different approaches, one for synth samples and one for drums.

    For drums I’ve done some Drambo kits. But I’m never 100% settled on Drambo. It gets too complicated, so I might try them with DigiStix now. In any case drums are pretty straightforward and I don’t think you’re referring to that.

    As for synths, which I believe is the main thing here, I tried with Audiolayer and ended up quitting. Yes, you can import EXS files, but it’s still a pretty tedious work. You need to first save to Audiolayer import dir, then import, save… one by one. The main consideration here is that SFM is a huuuge library.

    • the exs files contain a sample per note, that’s way too much for my use case. I can’t afford that kind of size and I don’t need a sample for every note, I’m ok with 1/2 samples per octave. That’s how the “essentials” sample from mars is laid out, good enough for me.
    • Related to the above, you could use iCloud with Audiolayer to minimize the storage issue, but you still have to download from iCloud into cache to preview Audiolayer patches. In my case, i just want to preview stuff quickly, I don’t know what im looking for!.
    • Recap so far: exs files are not “open and done” and they’re very heavy, ok for desktop overkill for iPad imo.

    What did I do?. A bash/Linux script to go through every synth folder and only keep a couple of files per octave. It copies those to a new dir. Then I imported those into Drambo sampler, with the right note names the auto map works and you just save them to a new preset. You could this in audiolayer too, I guess.

    Here’s my “minified” SFM folders and how they are imported into Drambo Sampler, auto mapped by name.


    Note: this is my original “one sample per octave” script, which just got the “C” samples from every folder. I’ll keep going on a follow up, as it’s getting long… hope it’s worth it!.

  • tahichetahiche

    Here’s my modified script where I also include “G” samples, so I have “C” and “G” samples per octave, richer but still manageable.
    There’s 12 samples for a preset here, I don’t have the original here but there’s a lot more…

    I’m gonna do a “import to Drambo “ from scratch…

    Here’s a “minified” synth patch in iCloud

    Create a folder in Drambo and import all the minified MS10 sample from mars samples…

    😴😴😴💤💤💤😴😴💤

    Now we have all the MS10 samples (minified version) in Drambo sandbox. Import a patch folder to sampler… in this example the same MrPink as above. The samples are auto-mapped. Just c & g samples…

    I could look for the script and send it to you. I tried with the Automator/scriptable whatever thingy in iOS and couldn’t get it to work so I ended up doing a bash script to run on my computer. There were some naming discrepancies in how samples from mars named the samples and a few other hurdles, plus I hate regular expressions…

  • krassmannkrassmann

    @tahiche this is a very cool solution. I would definitely like to have your bash script. Do you think the Drambo instruments are making use of sustained loop areas? Probably if I find time I would extend your script to create SFZ instruments out of this minified SFM instruments.

  • dvidvi

    I’m in the same boat here. I bought all the samples and audiolayer during the sale but haven’t spent time with the synths, only drums and all the found sounds, tape, and weirdo packs.

    I currently host them on google drive and download what I need to put in the digitakt. @tahiche your script looks great, I’d be interested to try it!

  • FingolfinzzFingolfinzz

    Is there somewhere specific that I need to put the samples for the exs import? Every time I import one, none of the samples seem to make it into AudioLayer

  • cyberheatercyberheater

    I’d like to see that script as well.

  • PoppadocrockPoppadocrock

    @cyberheater said:
    I’d like to see that script as well.

    +1

    I’ve only used chameleon but it’s not the same

  • tahichetahiche

    Hi. I’m attaching the script here. BIG BEWARE. This needs work to be any kind of “deliverable” ready. I was doing stuff on the go, changing the Regex and it’s in no way cohesive. I can’t test it right now, but luckily there’s a “DRYRUN” mode where it doesn’t actually delete stuff.
    Ideally this should be done within iOS , scriptable or such… If I have some time I’ll work on this and maybe make a mode decent version for use, but this could/should be a starting point.
    Make a copy of the SFM directories as this deletes files, could be easily modified to copy instead, probably a less dangerous approach…

  • tahichetahiche

    @krassmann said:
    @tahiche this is a very cool solution. I would definitely like to have your bash script. Do you think the Drambo instruments are making use of sustained loop areas? Probably if I find time I would extend your script to create SFZ instruments out of this minified SFM instruments.

    They’re not using sustained loop areas, that’s probably (if) on the exs, these are just wavs, the mapping is done according to wav names.
    I’d be great if you could make SFz instruments, although I don’t how id use those…

  • espiegel123espiegel123

    @Fingolfinzz said:
    Is there somewhere specific that I need to put the samples for the exs import? Every time I import one, none of the samples seem to make it into AudioLayer

    make sure that the samples are in a folder and that this folder is in a folder that contains the exs file.

    for example:
    folder myEXSInstrument1 should contain the exs file and a folder that has the samples

  • oat_phippsoat_phipps

    I think Decent Sampler is a free, easier alternative to Audiolayer. I used it just testing out a few and its not perfect, but I really don’t like Audiolayer.

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