Am I wrong to be underwhelmed by the sampler upgrades?

[brownerthanu]

I've played with the new sampler features for a few hours, and I must say I don't hear a lot there that excites me. Most of it adds noisy-ish overtones to samples. Am I missing something?

[crossmod]

The main upgrade is slicing, it was a total pain before which required multiple sampler insurances. The other stuff I can take or leave but slicing is really important for a good sampler to have.

[Dionysos]

Can one be wrong about being underwhelmed? It all depends on what you want out of it.

To me (and many others I think), this update fixed a pretty glaring gap in Bitwig's sampling workflow – easily tweakable slicing – while throwing in a good number of extra tools and features, some of which are unique to this sampler, and they're all in line with Bitwig's apparent philosophy of tweakabilty and experimentation. If none of these are relevant to what you want out of a sampler, I guess it's understandable that you'd be underwhelmed.

[JsinOwl]

I don't really use samples, so the update is underwhelming for me, but I recognize a lot of people do and they seem to be genuinely pleased, which makes me genuinely pleased. A point of view to hopefully put a positive spin on your underwhelmedness.

[sunthief01]

I've personally found Falcon a pain as a sampler especially when wanting to do granular sampling. And Falcon does not have a spectral sampling mode. I've been weighing the various Steinberg spectral sampling products for years (I was really impressed when I demoed Halton on Windows from a sampling perspective.)

If the new modes can get me in that ballpark (and run natively on Linux rather than via a bridge) then I'll be a happy camper. I've only had about 1 hour to experiment with the new sampler so I'll have to spend more time to know for sure.

[pdxindy]

I don't really use samples, so the update is underwhelming for me, but I recognize a lot of people do and they seem to be genuinely pleased, which makes me genuinely pleased. A point of view to hopefully put a positive spin on your underwhelmedness.

Same here... my use of samples is fairly minimal. I've rarely ever done slicing so it's not important to me, but lots of users have asked for slicing in Sampler so am glad they now have it. I'm happy to have the tool available even if I only use it infrequently.

I quite like the results with the new Spectral Mode. The sound quality is pleasing and it's capable enough to be useable in various cases. For example, today I took a plucked string sample and slowed it down to about half speed and it fit what I was looking for and it sounded really good.

The old Cycles mode tended to be hit or miss and so I didn't use it much. The percentage of acceptable results was too low. The improvements means I can reliably get satisfying results. Today I used a long pad sample with varying timbre and it was easy to get a diverse range of plucked sounds which sounded great with some start position randomization.

The Fragments mode I can get some lovely results. I particularly like it with the dynamic pitch option. I do wish I had a bit more control of the grain window.

I especially like that the cpu use is low enough that I can freely use Voice Stacking.

I wish that the regular sampler had an option to use Segments as the Amp Env, but I can use the Grid sampler for that.

Even though I don't do that much with samples, I'm pleased with the update cause the new Sampler is flexible enough that I don't need any other sample based synth plugins.

[gExpectations]

i cant believe they finally added slicing. ive been using bitwig since 2. i just took a break of a year or so, seems im coming back at the right time. i assume they didnt add chopping? (slice at playhead with running playhead). adding a slice at playhead keyboard shortcut is probably the only thing im missing from bitwig at this point.

[The Mantra]

I get what you're saying about the noisy overtones but I think that's just user error. I got some of that initially but after messing around with it I made a beat that I really like.

It's always a good sign when something turns from a beta testing experiment to a legitimate song. I recommend that you wait until Sonic Academy comes out with its series of tutorials on the new Bitwig sampler before making a final judgment.

Is there another sampler out there that you're actually impressed with?

[brownerthanu]

Is there another sampler out there that you're actually impressed with?

After playing more with this, I am starting to see the appeal. There are some pretty cool tonal tweaks that you can do with the spectral approach.

The repitch color and distortion sound really good.

I'm coming around.

[Caine123]

i dont have used my upgrade plan yet but the sampler seems pretty strong and feature rich? im looking forward to it!

[pdxindy]

i dont have used my upgrade plan yet but the sampler seems pretty strong and feature rich? im looking forward to it!

It's a solid all around update to the Sampler. Plus it's nice that it's still compact. It's not burdened by a bunch of tabs.

[Caine123]

i dont have used my upgrade plan yet but the sampler seems pretty strong and feature rich? im looking forward to it!

It's a solid all around update to the Sampler. Plus it's nice that it's still compact. It's not burdened by a bunch of tabs.

im still learning bitwig but afaik this sampler blows the FL Studio sampler on every edge away it seems

[MegaPixel]

Everyone is entitled to their opinion, there's nothing wrong with that. Even though you may get roasted for it on various forums, you know what people are like on reddit, kvr etc. If you don't think their way or agree with them then your the enemy and the flame war begins...





I purchased slice from antares autotune, as I wanted to do vocal stutters etc, its ok but takes a lot of work. I got chops 2 or something from WA production for free and that just didn't work (they gave me an option of pick any plugin instead, which they have done a few times now which is good of them), but bitwig has issue with a 2 or 3 WA production plugins I've had. Any hoo, back on subject...

I always found the sampler, beyond basic and that loop flag thing to be a bit illogical, and I'm very technical minded, seeing looping outside of boundary flags at times etc (I'm still on v5.what.ever.latest.last.version). And there was zero chance of doing anything really in that, I used it once in a blue moon to slap a sample in there which as always has a very small key range before it sounds like poo. So it would be a voc/choir sample clip with a huge amount of reverb or delay or both usually with what I do, and that was it.

Now why I brought antares autotune slice and WA productions slicer 2 (can't remember name into it). I wanted to make vocal stuttering and chops on the fly. The one from WA didn't work with bitwig and slice is powerful but a lot of work. And there was no way in hell bitwigs sampler would help, so it's always been a lot of work to do that stuff.

So I started cooking up a vst3 via juice that takes a sample and you can define cut ranges and assign them to a key, but here's the thing I wanted, kinda like some kontakt instruments do with key switches. So when i hit a key switch it turns that slice in playable instrument and if I hit the key switch to turn it back into slice mode it does exactly that so it allows me to play the vocal slice / chops on the fly. I got to the point just before making the key switches then work picked up and life and never finished it (looked like crap but was functional), its in some folder gathering dust in a dev folder in the middle of some drive somewhere now.

Now if the new sampler has granular player on it that will make it more useful for me as it will help with key range for sample use, instead of a multi sample instrument (ps. waiting for koda sampler from https://kodasampler.com/ to be released and completely destroy kontakt).

So for me... It's a meh... Already got granular plugins that I can drop a sample in and play back which are designed for granular effects etc so it's just a quick access light version of most of them for me. Its nice to have it there, I will now probably use it 2 or 3 times in a blue moon rather than the just once... Also from what I've seen of the UI, jeez it's dense, a lot going on there and in a very small space. Maybe they should have gone with sampler+ and given you a simpler ui in the module chain window and then go steroid version when full screening it taking over the timeline window.

And in the last video I watched about the new sampler, the chord lock thingy in Bitwig 6, still doesn't have a user defined/custom option in that, which would be more important to me for note/chord snapping in the piano roll (I hear this is a feature in BW6, I may be wrong, if it is and they didn't give custom key snapping presets or editor, and even options to automate between them (you know how bitwig is, they usually allow you to do that with everything), then I am amazed that that this wasn't implemented for v6.0.0).