Sitala drum sampler going into alpha, looking for feedback!

[Halonmusic]

Great stuff

[trancema]

Howdy folks --

We finally got another Sitala beta out the door (hopefully our last one before doing a 1.0 release) and once again are looking for feedback.

One of the things we'd like to see over time is more folks shipping kits in Sitala's format, so with this release we tried to focus on a feature set to make workflows for creating and maintaining kits as simple as possible. Some of the highlights are:

• Drag and drop kit management (dragging pads around to rearrange, etc.)
• Built-in file browser
• More advanced sound previews (paging left and right within a directory or set of directories)

So we're particularly interested in feedback from those of you that sell or distribute sample packs. A few questions:

• How much work do you put into trying to use specifics of a given sampler, vs. maintaining consistency across samplers?
• Would a built-in converter for other samplers (even if it just pulls in the sample names) be of significant help?
• Any specific work flow improvements that would make things easier for you?

That's excellent!

I'll copy my answer from another forum with same thread with few additions:

- I find Sitala very good addition to Logic Pro as the EXS24 sampler is old with clunky outdated interface and terrible workflow. Also, it's good addition for Reaper users.

Sitala resembles on Ableton's Simpler-DrumRack/Bitwig's Sampler-Drum Machine and that's fantastic.

The only must have feature that is missing for me is editing of sample start and end point (I am really surprised that this one wasn't implemented from beginning), but there are many other good things that Sitala has that surprised me as very usable, like 1-knob tweaks that also sound good and usable and built-in previous <-> next sample select from working directory.

I am looking forward to test-ride a new beta, but until it has sample start end editing (hopefully with zero-crossing option and automatable start - end markers, it really cannot replace TAL-Sampler for me, which, although not as fast as Sitala, it has everything I need and more, but I prefer smaller footprint, less complex interface of Sitala.
So, I am very excited about next release with sample editing markers.
Also, please check Studio One's "Sample One", next to Bitwig's "Sampler" and Ableton's "Simpler" as inspiration for the best samplers currently, workflow-wise.

Thank you for great product so far, please continue developing it as it has great potential to be No.1 on the market and me and many other people would gladly pay for it.

[jethrobull]

Fantastic news! Love this

[Obsolete236871]

Thanks, I can't wait to try the new version of Sitala and I'm glad the development continues!

...
Also, please check Studio One's "Sample One", next to Bitwig's "Sampler" and Ableton's "Simpler" as inspiration for the best samplers currently, workflow-wise.

It depends on what you want to do with your samples and Sitala obviously is a drum-focussed sampler (a really great one). But for inspiration I would add Serato Sample, especially in terms of how it allows you to slice sequences (melodic, rhythmic) into smaller pieces quickly and detects the scale / key of your used samples, so that you can tune samples of different sources to play along well. Serato Sample also has built in high-quality pitch-shifting and time-stretching that works independent from one another. So you can take a one shot note and pitch shift it without obvious artefacts over they keyboad and play chromatically for example or just bring different origin samples into tune.

[scotchi]

The only must have feature that is missing for me is editing of sample start and end point (I am really surprised that this one wasn't implemented from beginning)...

Our plan for the next release are to add that, and basically only that (so that we don't end up in another long release cycle). We're hoping this one will be more like 3 months from now, rather than the year long cycle that we got sucked into this go around.

A few weeks back we already talked through how we imagine the UI for such working (with a few niceties like automatic removal of silence, snapping to transients), so once the dust settles from this release, that's the direction we'll push.

[scotchi]

It depends on what you want to do with your samples and Sitala obviously is a drum-focussed sampler (a really great one). But for inspiration I would add Serato Sample, especially in terms of how it allows you to slice sequences (melodic, rhythmic) into smaller pieces quickly and detects the scale / key of your used samples, so that you can tune samples of different sources to play along well. Serato Sample also has built in high-quality pitch-shifting and time-stretching that works independent from one another. So you can take a one shot note and pitch shift it without obvious artefacts over they keyboad and play chromatically for example or just bring different origin samples into tune.

We know that a lot of folks have been using Sitala for non-drum sounds (and were genuinely surprised by that). However, we'll almost certainly steer clear of features for melodic sampling in Sitala. The UI for melodic sampling just needs a lot of things that don't make sense for drums and vice versa. That said, we're open to at some point down the line creating a melodic sampler based on Sitala that has a UI that's specifically geared towards those things, but that'll be significantly further out in the future.

[crimsonwarlock]

For me the only thing missing is the option to have velocity layers. It doesn't have to be very fancy, 4 or 5 slots for each sound with the option to set the velocity cross-over for each layer would suffice.

I do recall velocity mapping being discussed before. Anything like that on the horizon?

[scotchi]

For me the only thing missing is the option to have velocity layers. It doesn't have to be very fancy, 4 or 5 slots for each sound with the option to set the velocity cross-over for each layer would suffice.

I do recall velocity mapping being discussed before. Anything like that on the horizon?

We've talked a lot about it internally, but it's still a bit further out. It's a little bit more complicated for a couple of reasons:

The first is kind of an identity question. There are a lot of features that primarily make sense for emulating real percussion, and we've been uncertain if we want to start down the rabbit hole of implementing those, or if we want to keep Sitala focused on drum machine sounds. We go back and forth on this pretty regularly. Basically, if we're going to go down that route, we don't want to just half-ass it and introduce a bunch of complexity for something that Sitala only ends up being mediocre at.

The second is that, unlike editing sample start and stop points, we're still not sure how we'd do the UI. We've brainstormed a bit on the topic, but don't have nearly as clear of a picture of what it'd look like. And most UIs for velocity layers are pretty terrible. So if we decide to do it, it'll only be after we have a pretty clear idea of how we can make it not suck and remain easy to use, which is a pretty tall order.

I realize that doesn't give you a whole lot of actionable info, but hopefully gives some insight to our thought process...

[sinkmusic]

Thank you for the insight.

The only must have feature that is missing for me is editing of sample start and end point (I am really surprised that this one wasn't implemented from beginning)...

Our plan for the next release are to add that, and basically only that (so that we don't end up in another long release cycle). We're hoping this one will be more like 3 months from now, rather than the year long cycle that we got sucked into this go around.

A few weeks back we already talked through how we imagine the UI for such working (with a few niceties like automatic removal of silence, snapping to transients), so once the dust settles from this release, that's the direction we'll push.

Great !

[GaryG]

The only must have feature that is missing for me is editing of sample start and end point (I am really surprised that this one wasn't implemented from beginning)...

Our plan for the next release are to add that, and basically only that (so that we don't end up in another long release cycle). We're hoping this one will be more like 3 months from now, rather than the year long cycle that we got sucked into this go around.

That's good to hear, sample start editing is the only thing I really miss at the moment. If you were thinking in terms of people creating kits, do you think a gain control per sample would be beneficial? Then people could balance their kits without touching the front panel volume control, end users would know that the kit sounds as intended with all volumes at default.

[Iu Gob]

Thank you very much and congratulations for this great instrument. Sounds great and has a beautiful GUI. I think it would be even cooler if I had more dynamic possibilities ( pp, mP, mF, F, FF, FFF, etc.) . Perhaps implementing a flexible velocity to the VCA of the sounds. I think it could be useful since the rhythmic contents that could be achieved with this great instrument would be enriched.
Regards

[crimsonwarlock]

For me the only thing missing is the option to have velocity layers. It doesn't have to be very fancy, 4 or 5 slots for each sound with the option to set the velocity cross-over for each layer would suffice.

I do recall velocity mapping being discussed before. Anything like that on the horizon?

We've talked a lot about it internally, but it's still a bit further out. It's a little bit more complicated for a couple of reasons:

The first is kind of an identity question. There are a lot of features that primarily make sense for emulating real percussion, and we've been uncertain if we want to start down the rabbit hole of implementing those, or if we want to keep Sitala focused on drum machine sounds. We go back and forth on this pretty regularly. Basically, if we're going to go down that route, we don't want to just half-ass it and introduce a bunch of complexity for something that Sitala only ends up being mediocre at.

The second is that, unlike editing sample start and stop points, we're still not sure how we'd do the UI. We've brainstormed a bit on the topic, but don't have nearly as clear of a picture of what it'd look like. And most UIs for velocity layers are pretty terrible. So if we decide to do it, it'll only be after we have a pretty clear idea of how we can make it not suck and remain easy to use, which is a pretty tall order.

I realize that doesn't give you a whole lot of actionable info, but hopefully gives some insight to our thought process...

The best part of your answer is that you guys are thinking about it

I used to use Fretted Audio's Softdrum LTD which has four slots per sound for velocity mapping. That implementation works great and is pretty simple to understand. I no longer use it because it is 32bit only and it has one big flaw; it stores absolute paths for its samples and has no 'kit management'. I started using Sitala as replacement because it is 64bit, has the option to save kits and of course because it has a beautiful workflow.

So I eagerly await what you guys come up with in the hopefully not too distant future

Just for reference, here is the Softdrum link here on KVR: https://www.kvraudio.com/product/softdr ... ynth_audio

[scotchi]

If you were thinking in terms of people creating kits, do you think a gain control per sample would be beneficial? Then people could balance their kits without touching the front panel volume control, end users would know that the kit sounds as intended with all volumes at default.


 

Hmm, that's an interesting idea. I wonder if the way to implement it might be that when choosing to export a kit for distribution, if we save that value internally, and when that kit is loaded, that it always defaults to unity gain (i.e. "0") in the GUI.

[sinkmusic]

One little thing for content creators : it might be nice if there had an option to display a "covert art" picture when loading the kit (so if sample a tr606, it could display a tr606 picture, or any other artwork created). Then, once the user start playing with the pads, the picture would disappear, and let the enveloppe and waveform displayed.

[scotchi]

One little thing for content creators : it might be nice if there had an option to display a "covert art" picture when loading the kit (so if sample a tr606, it could display a tr606 picture, or any other artwork created). Then, once the user start playing with the pads, the picture would disappear, and let the enveloppe and waveform displayed.

That's also a very interesting idea. Ideally it'd be possible to see those cover images in the drop down menu for choosing kits. That'd naturally require restructuring that menu so that you could have meaningfully sized cover art, but that's something I'm open to exploring. Thanks!