Circle of Fifths

Documentation Index

Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.samplevault.ai/llms.txt

Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

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Overview

The Circle view in the Library lays every sample out by its musical key, on the classical circle of fifths. Each sample is its own dot, the same way it is on the Map — the difference is where a sample lands. On the Map dots cluster by sonic similarity. On the Circle they cluster by tonality. It’s a quick answer to “what do I have in F minor at 138 BPM?” — and a way to scan whole regions of your library you may have forgotten about.

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Switching to Circle

Pick Circle from the view switcher in the Library toolbar. Each Library panel remembers its own view mode independently, so you can keep one panel on the list and another on the Circle if you split your dock.

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Reading the wheel

• Outer ring — twelve majors. C/Am at 12 o’clock, going clockwise by fifths through G, D, A, E, B, F♯, C♯, G♯, D♯, A♯, F.
• Inner ring — twelve relative minors. Each major’s relative minor sits directly inside it — A minor inside C major, E minor inside G major, B minor inside D major, and so on. This is the classical pairing; samples that share a key signature share a wedge.
• Centre disc — keyless and modal samples. FX, percussion, drum hits without a detected pitch, and samples tagged with a modal scale (Dorian, Lydian, Phrygian, etc.) land here. A small label under the wheel shows how many.

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Radial axis

The radial dropdown in the Circle header decides what the distance from centre means inside each wedge: low values sit near the inner edge, high values near the outer edge. You can choose any of the sample’s sound characteristics — tempo, brightness, attack, stereo width, loudness, duration, and the rest of the Sound Profile. Flipping the axis rearranges dots radially without moving them angularly — the C-major wedge stays C-major, the dots inside it just spread differently. Use this to scan, for example, “fast bright C-minor stabs” by setting the axis to brightness and looking at the outer ring of the C/Am wedge.

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Interactions

Everything from the Map works here too.

• Click a sample to play it through the audio player.
• Drag a sample straight into Ableton, Logic, FL Studio, or any DAW that accepts file drops.
• Right-click a sample for the full sample menu — favourite, add to collection, set key/scale/tempo, classify, upload, copy, delete.
• Shift-drag to lasso a region and multi-select. Save the result as a collection or apply it as a filter on the List view.
• Arrow keys step through the visible samples in the direction you press, just like on the Map.
• Mouse wheel zooms; click-and-drag pans.

And one gesture unique to the Circle:

• Click a key label (e.g. the F♯ text on the outer ring, or Dm on the inner ring) to filter the library to that key + scale. The chip filter in the sidebar updates in lockstep — Circle and chip filter are bidirectional.

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How the Circle relates to filters

Active filters dim non-matching samples the same way they do on the Map. If you’ve filtered to loop + genre: techno, the wedges still show the wheel geometry but only matching dots stay at full brightness; the rest fade. Isolate in the Circle header hides the dimmed dots entirely. The chip filter for key + scale is bidirectional: click a wedge label, and the chip lights up; pick a key in the chip filter, and the matching wedge stays bright while the rest of the wheel dims.

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Searching on the wheel

Describe a sound in the search bar — or run Deep Search — and the Circle becomes a map of your matches — the closest samples stay at full brightness while everything else dims, so you can see where on the wheel your matches sit. Isolate hides the rest entirely, leaving only the results in their key positions. Suggestion chips appear in a strip above the wheel.

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Zooming and clusters

When you zoom out far enough that dots would overlap, the Circle thins each crowded area down to a few representatives. Those surviving dots grow to show they stand in for a cluster; as you zoom back in, they shrink and split into the individual samples behind them.