Find a sample's key and root note automatically
Best Friend listens to the audio and reports the note or key it hears — not what the filename claims.
Every sample you open shows its key in the label above the waveform, alongside its size in kilobytes, its length, and its name:
412.0 KB · 4.10s · F min · my-loopThat key comes from analysing the audio, never from the filename. Rename a bass note to the wrong pitch and Best Friend still reports what it actually hears. Analysis takes a couple seconds to load.
What it reports
| Material | What you get |
|---|---|
| A pitched one-shot — bass note, piano note, stab | A note with an octave, like C#3 |
| A musical loop with chords | A tonic and a quality, like F min |
| Anything unpitched — drum loop, noise, texture | No key at all |
The root note
For a pitched sample, the detected note also seeds the Root in the Defaults panel when you first import the file. That is what makes the sample play at the right pitch when you trigger it from a keyboard or from KEYS on the hardware.
The seeding happens on import only. Re-opening a sample you have already uploaded shows the key in the label but leaves the Root stepper where it was — so re-editing a sample cannot transpose a pattern you have already recorded with it.
Multi-samples
When you build a multi-sample, each row resolves its own root from its own audio:
- Audio wins. A correctly-named set and the same files renamed to nonsense land on the same roots.
- The filename is only a backstop, used when the audio is unpitched — an unpitched file named
… C3takesC3from its name. - An unpitched file with nothing useful in its name sits at C3 (MIDI 60).
- A root you set by hand is never overwritten by the resolver, even if it finishes loading afterwards.
Roots matter more here than anywhere else, because every keysplit boundary is drawn from them — one wrong root moves every zone around it.
