Homegrown Sounds releases Kit Creator v1.0

Homegrown Sounds has announced that, after more than a year of beta development, Kit Creator has now been officially released as v1.0.

Kit Creator is a program for Windows/macOS that automatically creates sample kits of up to 128 samples for various drum samplers/samplers. It can also do basic conversion between many of the supported formats. You can drag & drop up to 16 recursively scanned directories that contain samples and assign them as sample sources for each pad:

• SOURCE – Up to 16 recursively scanned Folders can be added via drag & drop and each assigned to any Pads.
• TEMPLATES – Add as many existing presets to use as templates for each format as you want. This allows creating complex instrument and the samples/selected parameters that Kit Creator supports will be changed. You can use a single template, cycle through all, or use a random Template.
• FOLDER ASSIGN – Folders are added via Drag & Drop and scanned recursively. There are 2 different views for assigning Folders to Pads, the PADS panel allows clicking a pad & selecting the folders to assign, whereas the FOLDERS panel shows a Matrix for seeing all assignments at once.
• PARAMETERS – This panel allows assigning minimum & maximum values for the generated random values for Volume, Pan & Release for each pad.
• FOLDER PARAMETERS – Recursive Scan, One-Shot, Reverse & Semitone Offset can be set per folder, both fixed and random probabilities are available.
• CHOKE/MUTE GROUPS – Up to 8 groups are supported for formats that support them.
• PRESETS – Saving the total state of Kit Creator to a preset is supported, so you can recall different profiles.
• THEMING – The theming system supports 24 definable colours which can be saved as a theme, a few themes are included.
• PROCESSING – This panel is where the export settings are located and the preset creation takes place.
  • CREATE – Creates new presets based on the selected settings to all selected formats.
  • CONVERT – This allows basic conversion between most of the supported formats. The conversion is based around what Kit Creator deals with, the lowest denominator is Sitala which supports 16 single samples. Kit creator always deals with 16 samples, volume, pan & release parameters. It isn't intended as a full on Converter for general presets, although it will work for the mentioned parameters.
  • UTILITIES – This page can edit existing files by editing the volume, pan & Release values in different ways, such as reducing by 10%. There is also a text based search & replace which works with the raw text files & so can be useful for replacing sample paths for example.
• SIMPLE MODE – Exports most formats & samples to an organised portable folder which uses relative paths (MPC & Ableton live excluded).
• ADVANCED MODE – Individual control over each types paths & options.
• RANDOM NAME GENERATOR – A database of around 30,000 words can be used to generate random names which can produce some amusing names. A 3 digit numeric name can also used in conjunction or instead.
• REQUIREMENTS – 64-bit Windows or 64-bit Apple M1/Intel.
• EXPORT Formats: MPC .xpm, Ableton Drum Rack .adg, Speedrum, TAL-Drum, TAL-Sampler, Sitala, Impact XT, Sampleone, TX16Wx, Octatrack Sample chain, CUE WAV & SFZ.
• BASIC CONVERSION FROM: MPC, Ableton Drum Rack, Speedrum, TAL-Drum, Sitala, Impact XT & Octatrack Sample Chain.

Changes to v1.0:

• Quick Start Guide to creating presets added to the manual.
• When on the conversion screen it is now necessary to select the type of preset you are going to convert. Previously this was done automatically based on what was found, although in the case of different formats being found, it would always select the first found. Now recursion is added, it has made it more essential that this be pre-selected by the user.
• Ableton Live Import Function has been rewritten for the ground up.
• Optional Additional sample search path has been added for Ableton Live imports. Search will look in the current directory/sub directories first, then in the Ableton User Sample library, and if the sample is not found it will then look in the provided additional directory & its sub directories.
• Option to convert Multi-Sample based .adg files (Simpler). Usually this would not be very useful because they tend to be chromatically mapped sample instruments, but some old presets do use this method to map drum samples & so they can now be converted.
• Recursive search option available when selecting a folder of presets to convert, this means it will search sub folders although all outputs will be saved to the same selected output directory. This option is enabled by default & is very useful when converting something like the samples from Mars sets which have the samples in a top level folder. By choosing the parent folder, all presets will be found as well as the samples.
• Various Tweaks.

Kit Creator is priced at $59.99 and has an introductory price of $39.99 until the end of August 2023.