Samplers / Sampling

Emu's range of soundcards offers an unprecedented level of flexibility, DSP power and sound quality for the price — with the added bonus of a very impressive software sampler.

NI have taken the technology behind Kontakt, and used it to build a sampler that's all about loops.

Rackmount studio samplers may be pretty much a relic of the past, at least in terms of manufacturers producing new examples, but it's not quite all software and computer RAM yet — not if instruments such as this new one from Korg are anything to go by.

Sampletank was a hit: a sample-based virtual instrument with great sounds and, at the time, not much competition. Two years on, there are plenty of fully-featured software samplers and non-sampling virtual instruments too. Can Sampletank 2 keep up?

Back in 1986, Sequential's Prophet 2000 represented a genuine breakthrough in sampling technology, and became a 'secret weapon' for up-and-coming programmers. We take you back to the dawning days of SOS, when 12-bit was king.

Two and a half years after the launch of Yamaha's impressive Motif workstation synth, the range has been further enhanced and upgraded. How much better can it get? We find out...

The latest in Roland's line of MC-series workstations is their best (and most expensive) yet, incorporating synthesis, sequencing, real-time control, and sampling. But in an increasingly software-driven world, can a Groovebox still cut it?

Can you advise on the powering and positioning of Behringer's Truth monitors? How can I control proximity effect? Why do speaker stands have spikes? Will Steinberg's Virtual Guitarist run on my PC? Will replacing my carpet with laminate affect the acoustics? Can you recommend a second-hand sampler with a floppy drive? How can I get broadcast masters to sound louder?

Korg give their creative real-time effects processor a face-lift, adding new algorithms, extra sampling power, and tempo-matching facilities.

Akai's MPC sampling workstations have been a studio fixture for nearly 15 years, and the MPC4000 is the most powerful one yet. But the world of sampling has changed dramatically since the MPC2000XL was released. Can an MPC still cut it in the 21st century?

Users of Propellerhead's Recycle could be forgiven for thinking that sample slicing couldn't get much easier, but Bitshift Audio's pHATmatik Pro aims to prove them wrong by offering an unprecedented level of integration with MIDI + Audio sequencers.

With a software sampler such as Emagic's EXS24, creating multisampled instruments from your favourite patches on your hardware sound modules needen't be a chore.

Although Native Instruments' Reaktor has offered sampling options for some time, it's taken the company a while to produce a dedicated software sampler: Kontakt. Can it make headway in what has become a crowded market?

Many people consider software samplers to have consigned the hardware equivalent to history. Not Akai, who have responded by releasing their best-value hardware samplers ever, offering unprecedented levels of computer integration, and packing them with user-friendly features.

Korg's Trinity and Triton have led the workstation market for so long that updating the concept can't have been easy — after all, how do you improve the best? So what's new in the Triton Studio, and will it keep Korg ahead?

The latest addition to Boss & Roland's SP phrase sampler range, the SP505, is crammed full of sample-editing options and dance/hip-hop-oriented ROM sounds, and continues the current trend towards ever-expanding feature sets.

Yamaha' s cutting-edge reverberation processor uses convolution techniques to sample the ambience of real acoustic environments, allowing extremely accurate simulations.

The latest technological advances in reverb design have yielded expensive hardware units that can 'sample' the sound of real rooms. Now Audio Ease's Altiverb brings the same convolving technology to the Mac — at a fraction of the cost.

The market for hardware samplers may be on the wane, but Emu aren't abandoning their hardware customers; their RFX32 effects/mixer card can add tremendous processing and routing power to any of their Ultra samplers.

Software samplers are revolutionising studio recording, but can they replace their hardware counterparts in live performance? Jazz keyboardist Django Bates is in the process of finding out...

The unique C-Loops from Red Sound Systems can automatically detect the tempo of incoming audio, sample it and chop it to length ready for re‑triggering, as well as automatically timestretching all its on‑board loops to match any new tempo it receives.