As a follow-up to my previous post I will show how to convert the sample pack of Music Thing’s Radio Music so it can be used with the Erica Sample drum (or any other sampler). You can find the download link for the converted sample pack at the bottom of the post :)

Radio Music

I think one of the most well known sampler modules in Eurorack is definitely the Music Thing Radio Music. What makes this particular module unique is that it is capable of streaming very long samples directly from its SD card. This allows it to tune between different “radio stations” (either manually or through CV control), hence the module’s name. If you’ve never hear about the Radio Music, a look at this great video by MylarMelodies :

The Radio Music comes with a very large and diverse sample pack. Unfortunately, these samples are not suited for other sampler modules, due to two reasons:

  • The samples are encoded in a headerless *.raw format, which many sampler modules can not handle.
  • The samples are way too long for conventional sampler modules as the latter have to fully load all samples into their limited RAM memory before the can be used. E.g. The Sample Drum’s RAM memory is 32 Mb large, where some of Radio Music’s samples are over 200 Mb large.

Converting the Radio Music sample pack

After my previous post, I wondered: Can Sox be used to convert Radio Music’s sample pack so that it becomes useable by conventional samplers (such as my Erica Sample Drum)? Luckily, the answer to that is YES! :)

The script below is a variation on the one I used to convert the MusicRadar sample packs. Here’s what’s different:

  • Because of the headerless *.raw files, you have to specify the input encoding yourself ( -r 44.1k -e signed -b 16 “$file”)
  • I chop up longer samples in to 30 second chunks, this makes it easier to handle these samples by a conventional sampler that needs to load the sample into its RAM memory (trim 0 00:30 : newfile : restart; done)
rmdir ../temp #if there's a temp dir, let's remove it
mkdir ../temp #now make a new temp dir
find . -type d -print0 | while read -d $'\0' subdir; #find all subdirectories
do echo $subdir; mkdir ../temp/${subdir// /}; #and recreate them in the temp dir
done
find . -name "*.raw" -print0 | while read -d $'\0' file; #find all *.wav files to convert
do echo $file; # for each file found
sox -G -r 44.1k -e signed -b 16 "$file" --norm=-1 -b 16 -r 48k -c 1 ../temp/${file%%.raw}.wav trim 0 00:30 : newfile : restart; done
; #convert to temp directory and split into 30 second chunks
done

Converting the whole library takes about 15 minutes.

Download Radio Music samples for conventional samplers

For your convenience, I’ve uploaded the Radio Music ample pack for conventional samplers to Google Drive. I’ve generated sample chunks with lengths of maximum 30 seconds because this is what suited me the best. If you need different chunk lengths, you can follow the tutorial and modify the conversion script to get exactly what you need.

Radio Music for conventional samplers (8.45 Gb)

With this sample pack come the same caveats as those of the Radio Music :

  • Treat this content as if it were off-the-air radio.
    i.e If you sample a Michael Jackson song from the radio, it doesn’t mean you have the rights to use that sample in your music.
  • Some, not all, of this material is public domain or creative commons licensed. Where possible, I have tried to find material with CC-BY or more liberal licenses. Check the ‘Source’ links for details.
  • Before publishing or selling anything created using this material, read about and understand Fair Use laws in your country.
  • Some of this material is recorded off-air from internet radio stations in languages that I don’t speak – my apologies if any material is offensive or inappropriate. Some of the material in English also includes strong language and crazy or offensive ideas.

Finally,

The Radio Music sample pack for conventional samplers is only a flavour of the actual Radio Music module. If you want to build one of these, you can buy them at Thonk. Or even better, have me build one for you! ;)

If you enjoy the Radio Music sample pack for conventional samplers, I’d love to hear! Feel free to drop a comment, send me an e-mail our like my Facebook page.

Also, feel free to have a look at my upcoming module, Steve’s MS-22.

Regards,
Tom