Kit assembly

Some drum libraries don’t ship as kits at all. They ship as browsing banks: one big folder per instrument category, each subdivided by a descriptive taxonomy — “Clean”, “Color”, “Tape”, “Various”, etc. The idea is you dig through and pick your own kit. Samples From Mars ships their “Individual Hits” this way.

assemble-kits reads that structure and generates one kit per shared flavor tag automatically.

patch-press assemble-kits "~/samples/909_from_mars/Individual Hits" configs/909Assembled

Expected structure

Individual Hits/
├── 01. Bass Drum/
│   ├── Clean/          ← files tagged "CLEAN"
│   ├── Color/          ← "COLOR"
│   ├── Tape/           ← "TAPE"
│   └── Various/        ← fallback pool
├── 02. Snare/
│   ├── Clean/
│   ├── Color/
│   ├── Tape/
│   └── Various/
├── 03. Hi-Hat/
│   ├── Clean/
│   ├── Color/
│   └── …
└── Cymbals/            ← categories with no flavor split are fine too

Flavors are discovered from shared subfolder names. A folder name only becomes a flavor tag if it appears under at least --min-categories different instrument families (default 2). This is what stops per-instrument idiosyncrasies (a lone “808-style” subfolder that only exists under Snare) from becoming spurious kits.

What gets generated

For each shared flavor tag (Clean, Color, Tape, …), assemble-kits picks one file per instrument category:

Tier 1 — a file from the category’s own subfolder for this flavor.
Tier 2 — if that flavor’s subfolder is empty for this category, fall back to Various/.
Tier 3 — if Various/ is also empty, take any file from the category.

Tier 2 and Tier 3 fallbacks are marked in a REVIEW comment on the config so you know which pads to eyeball.

The resolved file list is written into source.files in the YAML at scan time. Later runs of sample/batch load that fixed list — they don’t re-scan and re-pick. If assemble-kits chose a file you don’t like for one pad, you can hand-edit source.files on that one line and never worry about a re-scan overwriting it.

Config shape

source:
  type: library
  path: /path/to/Individual Hits          # the library root, for reference
  drumkit: true
  files:
    - /path/to/Individual Hits/01. Bass Drum/Clean/BD_Clean_01.wav
    - /path/to/Individual Hits/02. Snare/Clean/SD_Clean_03.wav
    - /path/to/Individual Hits/03. Hi-Hat/Clean/HH_Clean_02.wav
    - …

profile: drums

output:
  name: 909_Clean

The files list is what actually drives export — the path is retained for provenance.

`assemble-kits` options

Option	Default	What it does
`--min-categories N`	2	Minimum distinct instrument families a subfolder tag must appear under to be treated as a flavor. Raise it if your library has many single-category subfolders you want ignored.

Scope

assemble-kits only fires when the flavor taxonomy lives in subfolder names. Libraries that put descriptive words inside flat filenames (with no shared subfolder structure) aren’t handled by this command — that would need audio-feature clustering which patch-press doesn’t do. If your library is flat + keyword-tagged, use scan-library --type drumkit instead.