Soundplant

Soundplant is live performance audio software that turns your computer keyboard (yes, your QWERTY keyboard) into a versatile, low latency, multitrack sample trigger and playable musical instrument. It allows the assignment of sound files of any format and length onto keyboard keys (or MIDI), giving you hours of instantly-playing random access audio at your fingertips with no extra hardware needed. Use Soundplant as a performance, presentation, or installation tool, as a drum pad, as an educational aid, to mix tracks in realtime, trigger sound effects or background tracks during a show, sketch sound designs, make beats and loops, and give new life to old sounds - all via an input device you've been practicing on for as long as you've been typing. Because it's a standalone software sampler that uses your own samples to create custom soundboards, Soundplant is an infinitely flexible electronic instrument limited only by the variety of sounds that you feed it. An easy to use interface provides drag & drop configuration of each key, including options which control the way each sound is triggered along with several realtime effects. Playing sounds are displayed with a progress bar and track time, and you can even trigger sounds with Soundplant hidden while using any other program:

• 88 keyboard keys can be used to trigger sounds with very low latency, or use any MIDI device.
• drag & drop sound files onto keyboard keys for quick & easy key assignment; click & drag to move or copy sounds from key to key or new between Soundplant windows.
• plays virtually all sound file formats in existence, including .wav, .aif, .mp3, .mp4, .flac, .m4a, .aac, .wma, .alac, .wv, .ogg, .snd, .ape, & many many more, even audio from video files like .mp4, .webm, .mkv, .wmv, .avi, .mov, .mpg, .flv, etc.
• background key input allows Soundplant to receive key hits while minimized or hidden — trigger sounds with global hotkeys while using other audio apps, typing a document, playing a game, or doing anything else in any other program, with optional Ctrl/Alt/Option/Win/Command key combos.
• new v.50 has been rewritten from scratch optimized for modern 64-bit multicore CPUs & GPUs including native Apple Silicon support.
• unlimited sound polyphony, allowing for dense soundscapes & complex virtual instruments — mix tons of sounds at once, with full playback progress info displayed for up to 24 tracks onscreen.
• 32-bit floating point mixing & up to 384 kHz output for ultra high fidelity.
• unlimited sound length — fire off short effects or play huge hours-long tracks with equal ease.
• new limit 1 play toggle for making a key playable only once per session.
• new system keep awake built-in capabilities for preventing your computer & audio device from sleeping during a performance even if Soundplant is backgrounded, without having to touch system settings.
• record Soundplant's output.
• new record from from mic or any other input directly onto keys, with optional monitoring through realtime effects & mixing with Soundplant's output, all while continuing to trigger sounds — useful for podcast & mixtape production, live looping, or sampling from your favorite streaming app.
• highly customizable sound triggering, allowing for overlapping, restarting, fading, muting, & pausing, controlled by secondary key press or by key release, or use channel priority options to set certain tracks to stop or fade out on the start of other tracks.
• playlist queuing for flexibly triggering multiple sounds with a single key, allowing playing in sequence or shuffled, or all starting simultaneously in sync, or stepping through a pause-at-the-end-of-each-track playlist with a single key, or triggering a single random sound from a group of sounds — even play multiple playlists at the same time.
• fullscreen waveform zooming for setting sound start & end points at highest resolution, with new previous/next zero-crossing and previous/next sample for maximum precision.
• output device selection, including ASIO support.
• open an unlimited number of Soundplant windows for even more flexibility to output to multiple audio devices, gain more 'banks' of sounds, & record multiple tracks.
• unlike most players, sounds play entirely from RAM to avoid disk use during playback, & compressed sounds decompress on loading rather than during playback, for best sound quality & lowest latency.
• realtime volume, panning, eq, pitch, speed, lowpass, convolution reverb, highpass, distortion, & ring mod effects for each key, with randomization settings for richly varying sound playback.
• activity logging for time-stamped documenting of tracks played.
• full n-key rollover keyboard support — unlimited simultaneous key presses/releases can be detected on capable hardware — Soundplant is a great workout for your NKRO mechanical keyboard.
• simple view mode for larger keys that you can click or tap to play like a virtual cart machine, perfect for touchscreen devices or less advanced users.
• dark & light UI modes.
• onscreen keyboard keys are highlighted as they play & can be custom colored & labeled.
• pitch adjust allows microtuning to the 100th of a semitone & a 10 octave range, with new improved timestretch quality & lock pitch for handy tempo shift.
• easily auto-assign a sound to multiple keys at varying pitches to create playable instrument scales using pitch assign multi-key.
• easily splice pieces of a sound across multiple keys (for example, to extract individual drum sounds from a breakbeat) using slice multi-key.
• works identically on Windows or Mac, & saved keyboard configuration .keymap files are cross-platform compatible & can be easily transferred between different computers using save with sounds.
• includes several options for minimizing CPU & RAM usage for performance tuning so that it can run well even on older computers — Soundplant can give new life to that dusty old laptop you thought you'd never use again.

Soundplant is not a synthesizer, plugin, editor, or sequencer, but it is way more than a media player. Soundplant was designed to do one thing and do it well: to trigger sounds with maximum speed, efficiency, and ease of use. Users love its rock-solid stability for live event use, its simple one sound per one key metaphor which eliminates the usage complications of many other software samplers, its versatility for handling sounds of all types from short effects to full length songs to hours-long mixes, and its ultra-optimized use of the computer keyboard with lowest-possible latency requiring no extra hardware.