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Overview

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Assistant

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AI Assistant Instructions

A persistent prompt the AI reads on every conversation. Use it to describe your music style, sample library, and how you want the assistant to behave. What to include:
  • Your music style: “I mainly produce dark techno and industrial music”
  • Your workflow: “I prefer one-shots over loops” or “I like to layer multiple percussion samples”
  • Your sample library: “My ‘Dark Ambient’ folder contains atmospheric textures, while ‘Drums’ has acoustic and electronic percussion”
  • How you want the assistant to behave: “Be concise in your responses” or “Always suggest 3-5 samples when I ask for recommendations”
Example instructions:
The AI assistant reads these instructions with every conversation, so the more specific you are about your music style and preferences, the better recommendations you’ll get.
Think about your typical music-making session. If you always start by looking for kicks, and you always prefer dark, industrial sounds, telling the AI assistant this information means it will immediately understand what you’re looking for instead of giving you generic suggestions.

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Assistant Memory

Manage what the assistant remembers between sessions, alongside your assistant instructions. See AI Assistant for what it remembers and how it learns.
  • See every entry the assistant has saved, and edit or delete any of it
  • Switch individual entries off without deleting them, or turn memory off entirely
  • Confirm or dismiss entries flagged as possibly out of date
Entries stay in your library’s database on your machine. Memory is part of Professional Suite, or Lifetime with your own AI key.

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Preferences

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System Settings

Autostart on System Startup: When enabled, Sample Vault launches automatically when your computer starts up. This is handy if you use Sample Vault daily - your samples will already be deep-tagged and ready when you sit down to make music. New installs turn this on by default; you can switch it off here at any time. Search overlay visibility: Controls when the search overlay appears — whenever Sample Vault isn’t the focused window, always, or off. Also toggled from the system tray menu.

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Processing Speed

A single slider with four presets — Battery, Balanced, Fast, Max — controlling how much of your machine Sample Vault uses while it works through your library. A live readout shows the estimated memory and CPU cost of the preset you’ve picked, so you can weigh speed against whatever else you’re running.
  • Battery — minimal resource usage, ideal when your DAW is open
  • Balanced — good speed without competing for resources
  • Fast / Max — work through large libraries quickly when your machine is free
Whichever preset you choose, processing runs at a lower system priority than your other apps, so it gives way to your DAW and stays out of the way of live playback. The same slider appears in the Add Directory dialog and in the System Status panel while processing is running.

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Display Settings

Theme: Choose the colour theme used across the app. Your choice is saved and applied every time Sample Vault opens. Each theme sets not just colours but its own corner radius — from sharp and utilitarian to softly rounded. Themes are grouped into Neutral, Accessibility, and Studio classics. Neutral — daily drivers, darkest to lightest:
  • Midnight — the deep-navy dark; the default
  • Graphite — a clean neutral-charcoal dark
  • True Black — pure black, easy on OLED screens
  • Dim — a softer charcoal grey, easier on the eyes during long sessions
  • Ember — a warm, low-blue-light dark for late nights
  • Paper — a warm off-white light
  • Daylight — a clean, bright light theme for daytime rooms
Accessibility — maximum contrast for low-vision use or bright environments:
  • Contrast — black and white with a high-visibility yellow accent
  • Contrast Light — white and black with a high-visibility blue accent
Studio classics — one bold accent each:
  • Wavetable — near-black with a neon-green accent
  • 808 — warm black with a burnt-orange accent
  • Session — neutral grey with an amber accent
  • Console — graphite with an electric-blue accent
  • Pocket — a bone-white light theme with a punchy red accent
  • Screen — dark olive with an acid-green accent
Font: Pick the typeface used throughout the interface. UI Scale: Scale the entire interface from 50% to 200% to suit your display.

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Playback

Adjustments applied while you audition samples. Your files on disk are never modified.
  • Default volume — the level used for auditioning across the app
  • Normalize playback loudness — match perceived loudness across samples, with an adjustable target peak
  • Trim leading / trailing silence — start playback at the audio and stop at its end
  • Remove DC offset — strip constant DC bias without shifting transient timing
  • Boundary declick — a brief fade at sample edges to kill boundary clicks, with an adjustable fade length
  • Render samples as heard when dragging or copying — bake the active adjustments into the file your DAW receives, instead of sending the untouched original

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Privacy & Data

Turn usage analytics on or off, and choose whether to receive product emails. Marketing email preferences need a signed-in account.

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Sample Libraries

Manage which public sample collections appear in your library.

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Public Sample Libraries

Sample Vault includes curated public sample collections. You can enable or disable individual collections to keep your library focused on what you actually use.
  • Go to Settings → Sample Libraries
  • Toggle collections on or off
  • Disabled collections are hidden from the Library and search results
If your library feels cluttered with samples you don’t recognize, check Sample Libraries — you may have public collections enabled that don’t match your workflow.

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Organization

Sample Vault keeps your library organized as it grows — correcting and discovering categories by how samples sound, tidying the genre and tag lists, and building collections. Organization is where you shape what it does and manage the vocabulary it works with.
Processing Speed and the label lists that used to live under a separate Processing tab now sit in Preferences and here, respectively.

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Automatic organization

Turn the background organization on or off, and choose which passes run on their own. A house rules note — written in plain language, like “keep liquid and neurofunk separate” or “no tempo-based collections” — is followed across every pass. You can also run a full pass over your whole library on demand instead of waiting for the background chain. Because it keeps organizing on its own in between, an on-demand run has a short cooldown afterwards. It’s available on paid plans — see Sample Enrichment for what the pass does and Plans & Usage for how it’s metered.

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Your taxonomy

Categories, genres, tags, creators, and sample packs are all managed here. Edit them, add your own, and add categories that the sound-based pass is allowed to assign.
  • Lock a genre or tag so tidying never merges, renames, or prunes it. Anything you create or edit by hand is protected already
  • Renaming, moving, or deleting an entry asks for confirmation and tells you how many samples the change will affect, so a bulk edit is never a surprise

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Recent activity

Every automatic pass and on-demand run is logged with what actually changed — the categories it named, the genres and tags it tidied, and the collections it built.

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Connections

The Connections section (formerly API Keys) covers external services Sample Vault talks to on your behalf.

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Bring Your Own Key (OpenRouter)

Route AI calls through your own OpenRouter API key instead of Sample Vault’s managed pools — available on Professional Suite and Lifetime. Two modes — Key only uses your key for everything; Pools first, then key falls through to your key only when your plan’s pools are exhausted. See Plans & Usage → BYOK.

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Cloud storage

Connect a Dropbox account to route new sample uploads through your own Dropbox instead of Sample Vault’s built-in cloud. The panel shows account label and used / available storage once connected. See Cloud Storage for the full setup, file layout, and disconnect behavior.

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App Data

The App Data section provides access to application data directories and maintenance tools.
  • Reveal directories: Direct links to open cache, logs, and other app-related directories on your system
  • Cloud sync (Professional Suite): Turn syncing of your library’s catalog (tags, analysis results, and edits) to your account on or off. It’s off until you turn it on; enabling it is what makes your library available in the browser and on other machines. Audio files are not part of it and stay on your disk by default: upload the ones you want to reach from anywhere. Turning it off deletes the synced copy from your account and leaves the library on your machine untouched and fully searchable; turning it back on later uploads it again from that machine. The app restarts when you change it.
  • Database backups: Create and restore backups of your local database
  • Rebuild File Tree: Regenerate the virtual file tree if directories appear incorrect
  • Repair Database: Run an integrity check on your local database and fix what it finds — rebuilding indexes that have drifted out of sync, and rebuilding the database file itself if its internal structure is damaged. Use it when scans, deletes, or batch operations stall unexpectedly, or if a backup is refused because the database looks corrupted. Safe to run any time — no data loss.
  • Compact Database: Reclaim disk space the database is still holding. Removing folders or samples doesn’t shrink the database file on its own, so it can stay much larger than the library it now describes. Compacting gives that space back. Worth running after you remove a large folder. It rewrites the whole file, so it takes a while on a big library, needs free disk space roughly equal to the current database size, and pauses background processing while it runs. Your samples aren’t touched.
Database backups are experimental and may not handle very large datasets yet.

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Activity Log

The Activity Log records all background events in Sample Vault. Open it via Settings → Activity Log. The log captures two categories of events:
  • Sample processing — directory scans, analysis steps, feature extraction, errors, and retries
  • Cloud sync — upload progress, sync completions, and connection issues
Each entry shows a timestamp, the sample or directory involved, and the outcome. Use the log to diagnose why a sample failed to process or confirm that a sync completed successfully. Two actions sit above the list:
  • Retry failed requeues every failed job with a fresh attempt count. If the type filter is set, only that type is retried. Updates run in batches so a queue with thousands of failures doesn’t lock up the local database.
  • Clean up removes all completed and failed entries from the log. Pending and processing jobs are left alone.

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Account

Your account settings cover basic profile information and session management.

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Account Information

Shows your registered email address - this is where you’ll receive important notifications about processing status, subscription changes, and feature updates.

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Sign Out

Signs you out. You’ll need to sign back in to access your samples and preferences.