Image Line sample packs have severe quality issues

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h3h4
Sun Mar 19, 2023 9:39 am

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Image Line sample packs have severe quality issues

I have purchased some sample packs from Image Line, and these have some quality issues. The sample packs include:
- Generic Samples
- Real Drumkits
- Super Drums 8000
- Vocal Samples
- World
- Orchestral
- Nucleus Soundlab MK Digital Keys

These sample packs seem to be of quite poor quality. The issues I have identified so far are discussed below.

Some of these sample packs contain ".flp" files which often contain only a single pattern. These FL Studio projects are unusable as components from within the FL Studio browser and render the sample pack partly useless. You should not have to open a separate FL Studio project just to get a single pattern or loop to audition for your project.

There's also poor documentation for the download of the sample pack, some of which contain multiple files. The documentation does not make it clear whether there's redundancy between these files. E.g., some of the components zip files for the Orchestral sample pack do appear to have overlap between them, but they're not even organized in the same way, so they can't be easily merged. In fact, the component zip files do not even have their contents named the same way. E.g., one zip file had a folder named "Choirs and Voices" and another had one named "Choirs+Voices", and the contents of those folders weren't even organized consistently.

The naming is also quite poor in some of the sample packs. E.g., "General Samples/Chaos/chaos" contains 255 samples labelled only by their number. Even just perusing through these samples, I can observe some broad categories that could be used to make the naming much more useful (e.g., sfx, synth, sweep, perc, atonal, etc.). However, having 255 samples with basically no organization makes them somewhat unusable.

To summarize, the sample packs have the following issues:
- Unusable ".flp" files
- Poor folder organization and a lack of proper documentation describing how to handle sample packs with multiple zip files
- Inconsistent naming (capitalization, spacing, punctuation, folder structure, etc. all varies wildly, which is not a major issue per se but does not give much confidence in the sample packs and make the other issues unsurprising).
- Poor naming, e.g., large folders of hundreds of samples labelled only by number, when they could at least be named according to broad categories that would significantly reduce the number of samples distinguished by number alone and make browsing significantly easier

Image-Line should put more effort into these sample packs. I assume it's important to their revenue given that we have lifetime free updates, so they should take them a little more seriously. A sample pack is not just a collection of files. It needs to be usable. Usability is improved by:
- Good documentation explaining how to download and use the sample pack, including what to do with sample packs consisting of multiple zip files.
- A good, consistent naming scheme for files and folders.
- A consistent folder organization structure that is easy for users to navigate to find what they want.
- Avoiding too many samples distinguished by a number suffix only. Smaller classes of similar samples should be identified so that they can be distinguished by finer categories that are easier to navigate.
- Assets that can be rapidly auditioned and imported into the project (i.e., not entire FL Studio Projects)

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