I have a multitude of akai roms, giga, soundfonts and waves. I'm not going to upgrade my gigastudio, i've decided the upgrade price it a bit over the top.

What I want is a sampler that forms a central location for all formats, hence effectively building up a workstation environment.

But i cannot say I like any of the samplers i've used, they either impose restriction or crap on the user interface. If I want to keep it simple, well it should stay simple, if I want to go mad then it should allow me. Halion is restricted, Kontact, what a mess on userbility and building up banks (you cannot).

However I came to the conclusion that Vsampler does it all and more. I'm still trying it out, and I've seen little feedback on vsampler 3 recarding its import abilties or features, so i'll have to judge myself. But it seems to surpass both halion and kontact (though whether it compares on the filters I dont know, but all those filter types and options in kontact just had me confused).

I'm still unsure to go with vsampler or wait to see this emu thing. One thing is sure and I guess I made my choice - portability. With the Emu solution your basically locking yourself in. You cant take it to another PC or laptop.

Any comments on whats the best sampler out there for PC at the moment.

Regards,
Tachikoma.

Aside from loading in Soundfonts, I still prefer Giga, but that's what I've been using for 3 years too. I've had no desire to switch to anything outside of sfz+ or Giga considering I have well over 80 gigs of samples in Giga format, and do not want to 'translate' into a different format. Giga works, it works well, and I'm looking forward to Giga 3. sfz+ works just as well for .gig files, it doens't translate, and all the 'giga' features work, but I'd like the Gigapulse, and new Giga Piano for $149 as well, which is a bargain.

Devon

How about a combination of sfz+ (when the Giga playback feature goes public) and Extreme Sample Converter 2 to be able to access many other formats? Doesn't sound like you particularly need deep patch editing capability, and sfz+ give you access to most of the common parameters that sometimes need slight tweaking.

- m

I've pretty much given up on VSampler3. I had version 2.75 and got 3 with Sonar Pro. Compared to Kontakt it just seems to sound bad and work wierd. But that may just be me.

I'm not really sure I could recommend any sampler to meet the needs you have, but I will say one thing: your going to need at least one, most likely many, stand alone sampler converters. I have AWave and Extreme. By and large most samplers make poor converters. They just aren't serious about it or something. Well SF2 mostly works. Mostly. The more formats you want to support, the more likely your going to need something stand alone to do a good job converting it.

VSampler 3 has crashed my machine in the top 10% plugins of all time that do this (the vst version, bizarelly, the dxi versions seems more stable)

on the mac i am very happy with exs, on the pc sfz+ absolutely covers it all. my only real issues is there is no decent soundfont player on mac

If your daw is rewire freindly--I vote for Reason and
its nn-19,nn-xt samplers. I bought kontakt at one
point and just couldn't believe how much I hated the
interface. Reason has many great refills and it
support akai 1000/3000. Plus with Reason, you also get a very capable rex player and a great drum machine.

In general. its a good idea to skip the synths and
overhyped "cabling".

Tachikoma wrote:

Any comments on whats the best sampler out there for PC at the moment. Regards, Tachikoma.

You might give Unity Session a shot- there's a free demo on the Bitheadz website. It reads giga files without conversion, and a whole lot of other formats besides. Official support is for XP only but Win 2000 apparently works fine too.

The UI is a matter of taste so take a look for yourself. You may also not want to pay for the synth features if you're only looking for a sampler. However, I believe there's a special crossgrade price for owners of existing samplers so you might qualify.

It's cross-platform (Mac/PC) and doesn't need a dongle (challenge-response).

msorrels wrote:

By and large most samplers make poor converters. They just aren't serious about it or something.

Nothing to do with 'being serious' and everything to do with 'one sampler has different features than another'. You can't make another sampler do something it doesn't already have.

Devon

I think the major bread and butter libraries include Sonic Synth (which I have), Sampletank and Hypersonic.

JeffN

jeffn1 wrote:

I think the major bread and butter libraries include Sonic Synth (which I have), Sampletank and Hypersonic. JeffN

But he's asking about samplers, not ROMplers. Sampletank I know you can import new sounds, but I don't believe you could with either SS or HS.

Devon

prolly not what you want to hear. i was looking myself, having produced for years w/o samples. since i'm used to being able to customise my instruments with synthedit, i can't convince myself to spend money on one due to crap features, insufficient features, instability or basically being a piece of crap ripoff.

atm i'm sticking with what i've got and sfz+, and upgraded my strings to ewql. i'll be releasing a modulation sampler for sfx ~24hours :p

for anything i can't cover, my strategy is to address it with korg's physical modeling.

ie. once i needed medieval instruments - didn't have a lute preset on anythnig past a dx100 :p

it took a few days to track down free web mp3s of lute playing and make a patch i could use, but it worked. it was disappointing to see that there were no korg patches available.. i would have thought physical modeling would have appealed to some medieval recreationist composer somewhere.. even from korg.

i think the potential of physical modeling is still greatly overlooked.

Quote:

i think the potential of physical modeling is still greatly overlooked

Dammit, me too. Enough with the subtractive synths already, I'd love to see more PM-based stuff.

Othen that Xoxos stuff, the AAS stuff (which I've avoided on principle), and a couple of guitar and plucked string sims out there, I can't even really think of any PM vst plugins.

Yet I can't keep track of all the damn subtractive synths..

Come on, let's see the dawn of a new physically modelled era of VST plugins!

Laserguided wrote:

Come on, let's see the dawn of a new physically modelled era of VST plugins!

I think we will as the CPU's keep stepping up their processing power.

Devon

here's hoping!

Quote:

Best sampler for building a large library ?

I'd say it's toss up between Kontakt and Halion depending on your likes/needs. I have both and like them both, but my preference has been shifting over time from Halion to Kontakt. This is due to Kontakt's onboard effects and pitch-shifting which work well for R&B production. If I were only streaming large Giga libraries and doing soundtrack scores I would have probably stuck with just Halion.