Not yet owning a sampler, but meaning to get around to buying one, the news of the DS404 coming free with CM50 just had my psyched (hey now I just had to buy a magazine not a soft-sampler). Upon getting it, I thought "wow this thing looks scary, I'm not going to be able to figure this out," but after all of half an hour going through the tutorials in CM50 I had gotten down most of the basic features. Within a day with the DS404 I was pretty sure I had it all down. The interface is a bit confusing with all the different function keys, but you can quickly get the gist of them and even memorize what goes where. My main complaint is the lack of keyboard shortcuts, as well as mouse selections. There's no portamento, or sustain pedal response as well, the inclusion of which would have put this sampler over the top, but what do you expect for a freebie. Another complaint of mine is how picky the DS404 can be in regards to opening wavs. It seems if you go through a .wav editor you should be fine, but exporting a .wav out of Sonar and into the DS404 is just not happening until I go through another program to resave the .wav file. I really wish DS404 was a little less picky about .wav files as it would save me one extra step in the sample making process, but since most folks use wave editors anyway it probably won't be a problem for too many people, and even if it is putting them in Winamp and exporting the .wavs from there will do the trick. The samples included aren't amazing, but are certainly usable, take the Rhodes patches for instance, both are nice and would sit well in a mix, and the samples you don't like could easily be mangled into something else that you may. All in all DS404 had me creating my own multisamples within a day, having never done it before. It's well worth the price of the mag, and should be a welcome addition to any VST setup as well as a great way to intro yourself to the world of sampling. I'm looking forward to what Muon does with it.Read Review
