Sample Map

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 Map view in the Library lays your samples out as a field of dots, with samples that sound alike placed close together. Walk across the field and the character shifts under you — one neighbourhood is airy pads, another is punchy kicks, another is gritty noise — without you ever typing a word. It’s the view to reach for when you don’t have a search in mind: a way to rediscover the corners of a large library you’d forgotten you owned, and to see the overall shape of what you’ve collected. The Map is also the parent of the other spatial views — Circle of Fifths and Scatter Plot lay the same dots out by key and by two chosen characteristics; the interactions below carry across all three.

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Switching to Map

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

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Reading the field

• Position means similarity. Two dots near each other sound similar; distant dots don’t. Tight clumps are pockets of closely related samples.
• Colour means category. Each dot is tinted by its top-level category, and a legend names the colours, so you can see at a glance where your drums sit versus your pads versus your FX.

The layout is built from the same sound analysis that powers Deep Search — it’s reading what each sample sounds like, not its filename, so similar sounds land together even when their names have nothing in common.

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Scope

The scope control focuses the Map on either your whole library or a single top-level category. Narrowing to one category re-lays just that slice across the whole field, so distinctions that were squeezed together in the global view spread out — useful for telling apart hundreds of kicks, or every pad you own, in detail.

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Building the Map

The Map needs a minimum number of processed samples before it can lay anything out. Until you’ve added enough, it shows how many more it’s waiting on — keep adding directories and it fills in. After big changes to your library you can Regenerate the layout from the view’s overflow menu to fold the new samples in.

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Interactions

These gestures work on the Map, and the same ones carry across the Circle and Scatter views.

• Click a dot to play that sample.
• Drag a dot straight into Ableton, Logic, FL Studio, or any DAW that accepts file drops.
• Right-click a dot for the full sample menu — the same favourites, collections, edits, and batch actions you get in the list view.
• Shift-drag to lasso a region and multi-select everything inside it. Save the result as a collection, or apply it as a filter back on the list.
• Arrow keys jump to the nearest sample in the direction you press and play it, recentring the view if the sample would fall off-screen.
• Mouse wheel zooms; click-and-drag pans. Fit frames your whole library again in one click.

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Filters and Deep Search on the Map

Active filters dim the dots that don’t match instead of removing them, so the field keeps its shape while your matches stay bright. Isolate hides the dimmed dots entirely, leaving only the matching set in place. Search behaves the same way: type a description in the search bar — or run Deep Search for a more precise AI pass — and the Map becomes a picture of your matches, the closest samples staying bright while the rest fade. Because position still means similarity, you can see where your matches sit and what else is nearby.

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Clusters

When you zoom out far enough that dots would pile on top of each other, the Map thins each crowded area down to a few representatives so the field stays readable. Those stand-in dots grow to show they cover a cluster; zoom back in and they shrink and split into the individual samples behind them. Turn the behaviour off with the Clusters toggle in the overflow menu if you’d rather always see every dot.