24bit drum samples?

[aldio]

Where can you get some better quality (24bit,48/96Khz) drum/percussion samples? Preferably for free? I'm mostly looking for stuff sampled from drum synths/machines as opposed to acoustic kits. I'd like to use them in electronic musical compositions. No 909, 808 and other even older vintage sounds, please. If there's nothing for free you can also suggest commercial libraries, it's hard to find anything amognst them either. Most of them are also still 16bit 44Khz, vintage or acoustic collections or something very abstract or I just don't know what's inside them; I'm only going to know for real when I already bought them. My music is something like what 909 used to be used for, but they are too out of date now for anything except nostalgia.

Also, what drums/percussions are inside those Akai torrents at sampletorrents.com? I saw them but I don't want to waste my bandwidth if they're not for me.

Thanks!

[xsub]

Firstly, why do you need 24 bit samples?... Not quite sure why you need such high quality, when all the output mediums will be 42hz.

and as for bandwidth, do you have a modem?.. If you have broadband, then you won't have a problem downloading them.

[BertKoor]

16bits samples are good enough to work with.

Firstly, the added 8 bits in 24bits samples only contain noise.

Secondly, the original machines often used only 12bits samples. Can be captured perfectly in 16bits.

And finally, your product (your composition) will be published in 16bits/44kHz. The drum samples in that will not be louder but softer than the original samples. If they are put back in the mix by 12db, only 14 of the 16bits are actually used. (the rest only counts for rounding decisions in the final dithering process)

At www.hollowsun.com you can find a link to the Nostalgia sample CD. An excellent collection of vintage beatboxes and more.

[aldio]

The output media could not only be CD. Nontheless, even if it is CD, as it will most likely be, 24bit dithered to 16bit is supposed to sound better. At least that's what I read. I don't really understand what you mean by "they are put back in the mix by 12db".

I don't know much about hardware, if they really only use 12bit samples then there's no reason to go for 24bit, you're right about that. I just thought that 24bit is the new standard, or at least it's going to be and I might as well take advantage of it if I can. Are you saying though that there's no sense in using better quality in general or it only applies for the drum section?

[aldio]

Searched the net

From Wikipedia on TR-909:

"All drums except for the hi-hats and cymbals are synthetically generated; there is an oscillator circuit with a dedicated filter and envelope curve. The hi-hats and cymbals 8-bit samples, compressed and combined with a volume envelope curve to allow slight modification. Thanks to the analog circuitry, various aspects of the drum sound can be modified (pitch, attack, decay)."

Since this is an analog machine the synthetically generated sounds should sound better when recorded in 24bit and 96Khz, shouldn't they. There are no 12 bit samples there.

[dasdeck]

mmhh, even if the older drummachines use 12 bit samples, you can not neccesarily cath the character of them with a 16 bit recording of its output (at least if you want to catch single samples for your sampler). the DA Converters and the slight little rest of analog out (most of the older drum machines have analog out me thinks) add character too, and not to forget your own AD converters.
But thena again, capturing the original sound might not be the best you can get, maybe you record your children throug an open channel whyle you record samples and end up wiht an even nicer sound

D3CK

[BertKoor]

I don't really understand what you mean by "they are put back in the mix by 12db".

Most samples are normalised. That means that there's a peak value hitting the full-scale of 0dB.

Your conmposition can't have peaks going over the same full-scale 0dB. If there are other things to listen to other than these samples, you have to set back the track level to prevent clipping. Or you apply a limiter which turns down the level for you.

If you take two audio tracks and mix them properly without them clipping, you have to bring down the level on each with 3dB (can be 2 or 4) so the sum doesn't clip. With four audio tracks that's 6dB. In a busy arrangement the track levels have to go even lower. You can't add more noise without having to reduce the overall level. Either per track or on the master bus: somewhere in the chain it has to go down.

So a sample in the context of a composition is always softer than it was on its own. So 16bits is sufficient for most.

Ofcourse the host will do internal calculations with 32bits precision. So nothing is lost until the final export, probably done in 16bits. In most listening environments you can't hear background noise even if it's there at -75dB.

Don't get tempted by "bigger is better" since enough is enough. Ofcourse there is DVD-Audio and SACD, and delivering 32bits files for mastering is good practice. But I tempt you to prove that using 24bits samples of electronic drums will give significant better results.

Just my opinion, others will probably argue...

[Rangtangtang]

Just thinking, arn't the more recent Roland drum boxes, just samples of the older original? Electonics is expensive and takes a lot a space, thats why they use a glorified sampler hardware equivalent.

[xsub]

You could just experiment with it all, use some 24bit samples, 96khz and all that, then convert them to another format, replace them in your mix (in this case the drum samples) and see if you can tell the difference once you have rendered them to wavs for cd burning.

If you want to have the choice open, so you are able to have them on 24bit etc on a dvd that you may sell at some point, then I guess you could use the best quality samples, but for me - I am not bothered, 44.1khz sounds fine to me and I'd rather have better performance editing the mix, then a better audio sample rate while making the mix (which for me, would be converted to cd anyway)

[aldio]

Thanks for the thorough explanation BertKoor. Here's the link to the guide that made me somewhat "bit-wise": http://www.izotope.com/products/audio/o ... gGuide.pdf
But I don't think you argue what's said in it in general, and whether, in the specific case of drum samples, 24 bit gives better results is something that I can't prove; but on the whole the appliance of better quality must make a difference.

[aldio]

And, xsub, I'd be more than happy to experiment, the point is that I couldn't find 24bit resources, free or otherwise.

And I have broadband by the way, but with a monthly limit.

[soniccouture]

anyway, check out Abstrakt : Konkrete for electronic drum samples -you'll find the audio quailty to be second to none.

Konkrete Drums

[Left Headphone]

Synthetic Drums 2

[aldio]

Yeah, Synthetic Drums seems a good one. I don't have either Kontakt or Battery though; still, if the samples are also included as separate wav files or can be extracted, it could be worth the price. I don't need the preset kits, with electronic music they're usually more of a drawback than advantage, or at least I prefer to browse all the samples and build up my on kit for a song. But anyways, also because I downloaded some free .nki files, is there a way to extract .wav samples? It seems that CDXtract can't. Any other solutions?

[bro. miles]

Here's some good free ones in 16 and 24 bit.
http://tchackpoum.free.fr/english%20ver ... amples.htm