Survey: Which software sampler are you using and why?

Pianobook community sample libraries

If you did not stumbled across this awesome community project yet, you definetely should have a look at it. In particular if you are into anything sound design or film scoring related.

“Pianobook is a collective sample project inspiring musicians to embrace the magic of sampling and share their creations with the community.”

pianobook.co.uk

If offers a sheer number (520 at the time of writing) of sample libraries free to download and use. The actual content is not limited to piano libraries but meanwhile contains quite a range of different acoustic instruments or even voices and some synthetic stuff.

While centered around Kontakt capabilities when once started, it meanwhile offers also downloads in EXS or Decent Sampler format, at least to some extend. On top, it is an open project and invites everybody to also contribute to the library.

Home

One should definitately check out the upright pianos to discover some real gems. Also the “found sounds” section reveals some great discoveries. To get a glimpse and more easy access to the library as a whole, I strongly recommend the according YT channel.

 

working ITB at higher sampling rates

Recently, I’ve moved from 44.1kHz up to 96kHz sampling rate for my current production. I would have loved to do this step earlier but it wasn’t possible with the older DAW generation in my case. With the newer stuff I was easily able to run a 44.1kHz based production with tons of headroom (resource wise – talking about CPU plus memory and disk space) and so I switched to 96kHz SR and still there is some room left.

I know there is a lot of confusion and misinformation floating around about this topic and so this small article is about to give some theoretical insights from a developer perspective as well as some hands-on tips for all those who are considering at what SR actually to work at. The title already suggests working ITB (In The Box) and I’ll exclude SR topics related to recording, AD/DA converters or other external digital devices.

analog vinyl sampling – WTF?

Analog Vinyl Sampling from Ishac Bertran on Vimeo.

Experimental analog sampling with modified vinyls.

Sectors from a vinyl record are cut and replaced by pieces with exact shape from other records. When played in a vinyl player the needle follows the grooves from both sectors creating sampled tunes or loops.

More information here: http://blog.ishback.com/?p=918

In this video:

Supertramp – Crisis? What Crisis?
Paul Anka – My Way
Chicago – Chicago X
Lil Jon – Kings of Crunk