Chapter 10. Sound Library (Drumkit/Pattern/Song Manager)

Table of Contents

10.1. Drumkits
10.2. Songs
10.3. Patterns

Figure 10.1. The Soundlibrary

The Soundlibrary

The Sound Library helps you manage your drumkits, favourite patterns, and favourite songs. When making new songs or drumkits, it allows you to reuse and mix instruments as well as patterns from other kits and songs.

It is located in the Instrument Rack in the lower right corner of Hydrogen, which can be shown or hidden via the View option in the Main Menu or via the corresponding button in the Main Toolbar. The Instrument Rack does either show the Instrument Editor or the Sound Library depending on what is chosen in the View option in the Main Menu or the corresponding buttons at the top of the Instrument Rack.

10.1. Drumkits

The list of drumkits comprises kits present at both system and user level as well as those loaded via command-line option or OSC command.

The System drumkits are those installed with your package manager or when compiling Hydrogen manually. Their location is determined by the compile-time prefix. On Unix-like operating systems, this is usually /usr/share/hydrogen/data/drumkits, or possibly /usr/local/share/hydrogen/data/drumkits. These kits are available to all users on the system and you usually have no write access to them which is why you only have read access to the kit's properties and can not delete them. If you want to change one of these kits you have to load it via right click and save it first. This will add a modified copy on user level.

The User drumkits are those which you can manage yourself. They are stored in the Hydrogen data directory (usually $HOME/.hydrogen/data/) within the drumkits subfolder. When you have created a new drumkit via New in the Drumkit option of the Main Menu, you can save it using Save As from the same menu. In addition, you can also Online Import a number of drumkits provided by the dev team of Hydrogen.

[Warning]Warning

If you are using Hydrogen for creating songs or drumkits or redistribute existing ones you need to pay special attention to the licenses of the drumkit(s) you are using.

DISCLAIMER : Hydrogen is not responsible for the drumkits that are made available for download by our users, either via the hydrogen-music.org or via any other channel.

To load a drumkit via the Sound Library, right-click the drumkit and select Load. This will replace your current drumkit with the one that you selected. To load a single instrument from that kit, left-click the to the left of the drumkit's name to show all the instruments. With your left mouse button, click and drag the instrument into your current kit. The instrument will be added to the drumkit that you currently have loaded.