Kit Creator for Ableton Move

A fast, browser-based web application that turns your drum sample libraries into hardware-ready Ableton Move preset bundles (.ablpresetbundle).

🔗 Live Web App: https://move-kit-creator.vercel.app/

Features

• 📁 Folder Drag & Drop: Drop sample folders directly into the browser, or use Pick folders / Pick files where dragging is not possible (a phone, say). Some mobile browsers only offer a file picker for folders; use Pick files there. Reads .wav and .aiff files recursively; Microsoft ADPCM WAVs are converted to 16-bit WAV, other compressed WAVs, compressed AIFF-C and big-endian (RIFX) or RF64 WAVs are skipped (listed in the browser console). Nothing is uploaded — everything runs in the page.
• 🗂️ Collections: A dropped folder that holds several independent packs (Kit 1 ... Kit 7, a set of named banks) is listed as a parent with its sub-packs as child rows. Tick the parent to use everything, or tick only some sub-packs to mix and match; the parent's eye shows a partial state when some are on. A folder of role folders (Kicks, Snares, FX ...) stays one pack.
• 🎯 Smart Classification: Detects sample roles (Kick, Snare, Closed Hat, Open Hat, Clap, Crash, Percussion, Other) from filenames and folder names, tuned against real sample libraries. A hat with no open/closed qualifier is treated as closed, a crash is drawn from the percussion pool, and a bare 808 is a kick.
• 🧹 Loop & Non-Drum Filtering: Leaves out loops (a bar count, a tempo like 128bpm, or a filename saying "break" on a file it could not otherwise categorise) and uncategorised material that looks like effects, vocals, scratches or melody — including anything sitting in an Extras, Imported or Misc folder. Only ever applies to files the app could not categorise, so a sample called "Bass Kick" is untouched. Both filters are toggles.
• 🎛️ Derived 4×4 Pad Grid: The grid is built from the categories your library actually holds rather than picked from a fixed list. Up to four categories take a full-height column each; a fifth and beyond share the top row. Mapped to hardware MIDI notes 36–51 (Pad 1 = bottom-left).
• 🆔 Grid IDs: Every grid gets a short fingerprint of its arrangement — ksho for Kick / Snare / Closed / Open, ksho_ccpp when claps and percussion share the top row. Kits sharing an ID lay their pads out identically, so one drum rack can replace another on the device. The ID travels in the exported kit name.
• 👁️ Disable a Type: Every row of the Breakdown by Type card has an eye icon. Switch a type off and every sample of it is left out of generation and the grid drops that column — the same idea as disabling a source folder. Rows are pools, so closed hats take generic hats with them and percussion takes crashes.
• ✏️ Sample Browser: The pencil next to Usable Samples opens all loaded samples by type and kind (hat pairs first). Cursor keys move and play, Space plays again, X leaves a sample out of every kit or brings it back.
• 🥁 Disable a Kind & Variety: Kick, snare, clap and percussion rows open a list of the kinds in your library (toms, shakers, bells, chimes, rimshots, rides ...) with an eye icon each, so "no toms" is one click; pads show the kind (SHAKER, BELL, CHIME, RIDE ...) where it is more specific than the category. Percussion pads hold at most two of the same kind when other kinds are available.
• 🥁 Hat Pairs: Packs that ship matching closed and open hats (BlockPatrol-Hat.wav and BlockPatrol-HatOpn.wav) keep them together: a drawn closed hat puts its open partner on the open-hat pad directly to its right. Matched by file name only (numbers and shared pack prefixes never pair); closed hats are drawn as usual and locked pads are left alone.
• 🔇 Automatic Choking: A kit with both closed and open hats makes all its hats choke each other (Choke Group 1). With only closed or only open hats nothing chokes, and crashes and rides never choke.
• 🔒 Pad Locking & Single Reroll: Lock pads to hold sounds while randomising the rest, or reroll individual pads on demand.
• 🎹 Keyboard Hotkeys: Audition pads using grid row keys (1 2 3 4, Q W E R, A S D F, Z X C V); Space generates a new kit unless a field or another button has focus (it then activates that button) or the manual is open. Ticking Auto Preview previews the current kit at once.
• 🔊 Kit Preview & Auto-Preview: Step through the whole kit in pad order, with playback timed from when each pad is actually audible rather than when playback was requested.
• ✂️ Silence Trimming: Trims leading and trailing silence (< -60 dBFS) via the Web Audio API, preserving the source sample rate and bit depth. Metadata chunks (LIST, bext, iXML, ID3 ...) are always removed from WAV files, because the Move cannot use them and your originals stay with you. With trimming off the audio is copied as it is; with trimming on, a 16- or 24-bit WAV that has silence to cut is re-encoded (same sample rate and bit depth); AIFF files are converted to WAV on export; files that cannot be trimmed keep their audio.
• 📦 Batch Exporting: Batch Download packages up to the amount you choose (1 to 10) of kits: the kit on screen plus new randomised ones, never more than your samples fill before they have to repeat. By default each kit downloads as its own .ablpresetbundle file, one after another; your browser may ask once to allow multiple downloads, so choose Allow. Choose One zip for a single <prefix>_Batch.zip instead (unzip it before uploading the bundles to your Move).
• 🔒 Privacy: Samples never leave your computer. The only things the app stores, in your browser's local storage, are two interface settings: the Quick preview tick and the batch amount. Cloudflare and Vercel web analytics count visits only.
• 🔔 Toast Warnings: A top-centre notification for substituted categories, empty pads, or roles the library cannot fill.

Quick Start

Prerequisites

• Node.js (v18 or higher)
• npm (ships with Node.js); package-lock.json is the only lockfile

Installation & Running Locally

1. Clone the repository:

   git clone https://github.com/Nipheon/kitCreatorMove.git
   cd kitCreatorMove
   

2. Install dependencies:

   npm ci
   

3. Start the development server:

   npm run dev
   

   Open your browser to http://localhost:3000. The dev server binds 0.0.0.0, so the app is also reachable from another machine on your network.

Testing & Verification

npx tsc --noEmit     # Strict TypeScript type check
npm test             # Node tests: kit generation, classification, export, naming (test/kit.test.ts), drop handling and trimming (test/io.test.ts)
npm run build        # Production build

Project Layout

index.html              # Entry page: SEO tags, JSON-LD, static fallback content, Cloudflare analytics beacon
package.json
package-lock.json
tsconfig.json
vite.config.ts
.gitignore
README.md
LICENSE
AGENTS.md               # Conventions and hard-won rules — read before editing
public/                 # Copied to the site root by Vite
  icon.png              # Header icon (third-party, see Credits)
  icon-32.png           # Favicon (derived from icon.png, see Credits)
  icon-180.png          # iOS home-screen icon (derived from icon.png, see Credits)
  og-image.png          # Social preview image (1200x630, shows the drum, see Credits)
  robots.txt
  sitemap.xml
src/
  App.tsx               # Main application component & layout
  main.tsx              # React entry point (also mounts the Vercel analytics component)
  types.ts              # Core TypeScript interfaces & types
  padLayout.ts          # Grid derivation, grid IDs, pooling & choking
  devSeed.ts            # Dev-only sample set, loaded with /?seed
  index.css             # Theme tokens, font sizes and pad styles
  vite-env.d.ts         # Vite client type reference
  components/
    Pad.tsx             # Single pad: audio element, audition, lock/shuffle
    SourceFolderRows.tsx # Source Folders rows, collections with tri-state parent
    Toast.tsx           # Warning notification
  utils/
    ablPresetTemplate.ts # Ableton Move preset JSON generator
    adpcm.ts             # MS ADPCM to 16-bit PCM WAV conversion at import
    audioTrimmer.ts      # OfflineAudioContext silence trimming
    exporter.ts          # JSZip bundle, separate-file and zip batch export
    fileReader.ts        # Sample classification & folder parsing
    folderGroups.ts      # Collection grouping, tri-state and multi-folder toggle/remove plans
    folderMerge.ts       # Folder de-duplication across drops
    hatPartner.ts        # Closed/open hat pairs by file name
    kitGenerator.ts      # Kit selection & pad assignment
    kitNaming.ts         # Kit names, held layouts and batch building
    progressVisibility.ts # When the duplicate-check progress indicator may appear
    sampleSignature.ts   # Audio-content signature, read lazily at draw time to skip duplicates
    packSplit.ts         # Splits a dropped collection into its sub-packs
    scanProgress.ts      # Throttle and wording for the inline scan progress under Source Folders
    wavStripper.ts       # WAV chunk parsing (readWavFormat) and stripWavMetadata (used by export)
test/
  kit.test.ts           # Kit, naming, export and detection tests
  io.test.ts            # Drop handling and trimming tests (fake OfflineAudioContext)

How It Works

1. Drop Sample Folders: Drag any folder of drum samples into the app window, or press Pick folders (or Pick files) to choose them from your device.
2. Library Analysis: Every file is classified from its name, falling back to the folder it sits in. Loops and non-drum material are filtered out, and the sidebar breaks the library down by category.
3. Grid Derivation: The categories present decide the grid — four columns, four rows, with a shared top row when more than four categories are available. The result carries a Grid ID such as ksho or ksho_ccpp.
4. Generate & Audition: Hit Generate Random Kit, or play pads with the mouse and hotkeys. Lock what you like, reroll what you don't, exclude samples you never want to see again.
5. Export to Hardware: Download Kit downloads the kit on screen as a single .ablpresetbundle file named PREFIX-gridid-Suffix (e.g. MKT-ksho-Nova). A batch downloads one such file per kit (or, with One zip, a single <prefix>_Batch.zip). Each bundle is one file, not a folder: upload it to your Move.

Contributing

AGENTS.md documents the conventions, and most entries exist because a simpler version broke on a real sample pack. Read it before changing classification, grid derivation or the preset template. Every change is expected to leave npx tsc --noEmit, npm test and npm run build clean, and to keep AGENTS.md describing the code.

Built With AI

Developed with the assistance of Google Gemini and Anthropic Claude AI models for architecture, design, test-driven implementation, and optimization.

Credits

Drum icon by iconfromus from Magnific, used under its attribution licence. It ships in this repository as public/icon.png, and the images derived from it (public/icon-32.png, public/icon-180.png, and public/og-image.png, which shows the drum) carry the same terms. None of these four files is covered by the licence below.

License

BSD Zero Clause License (0BSD) — do whatever you like with this. No attribution required, no notice to preserve, no conditions of any kind.