Digidesign SampleCell II

The SampleCell II PC card can turn your humble PC into a fully‑featured, 32‑voice sample replay unit with eight individual outputs. Brian Heywood investigates.

Despite the advent of new synthesis technologies like physical modelling, a sampler still represents the quickest means of recreating a realistic instrument sound. This is especially true when you consider the large amounts of commercial sound samples and breakbeats available. The traditional way of obtaining professional quality sampled sounds would be to purchase a stand‑alone module (eg. Akai S1000, Emu Esi32, Roland S760 etc), load the sounds from CD, and then use the sampler's front panel controls to create a multi‑sampled instrument. You then trigger the sampler from your MIDI sequencer to produce your musical masterpiece.

Another approach would be to use a Windows MPC soundcard that has a RAM‑based wavetable synthesizer (like the Turtle Beach Maui or Creative Labs AWE32 card) to give you a sampler inside your PC. On the face of it, this looks like a very attractive option, as it is bound to be cheaper than a stand‑alone unit. For a start, you are not paying for items such as the power supply and the case, and you get a much improved editing interface. This editing interface is important, since before you can use the raw sound data you must create a sampler 'program' which relates the individual sample sounds to a MIDI note, or range of notes. The soundcard/sampler then just appears as another MIDI device to your sequencer, which would be used in the same way as an external sampler.

However, there are problems with the PC soundcard approach; the sound quality of most cards is not up to the standard required by today's musician, and MPC soundcards are almost invariably limited to a single stereo audio output. This last point is a real killer in a studio situation, since it means you cannot individually EQ or process the soundcard instruments so that they fit in with the mix. Consider a fairly simple situation where you are using the sampler as a glorified drum machine. What happens if you want to beef up the bass drum? On any decent stand‑alone sampler this signal would appear on a separate output, allowing you to use your mixer's EQ and your funky outboard effects processors to sort out the problem. On a PC soundcard you would need to adjust the original sample, since it is buried in the stereo mix.

Enter Samplecell II PC...

Digidesign's solution to the problem is to provide a sample replay card that has eight individual outputs, thus giving you the audio flexibility of a stand‑alone sampler along with the substantial advantages of an integrated sample editing package. The computer's user interface — namely a nice big screen display and the keyboard/mouse input combination — is far superior in terms of usability than the front panel controls found on stand‑alone samplers, even if the editing facilities are broadly comparable. Although you can buy computer‑based sample editors — SampleVision, for instance — these tend to be limited to basic sample editing, leaving you to create the overall program using the sampler's front panel controls.

One thing that should be made clear from the outset is that SampleCell II is a sample replay card — you can't use it to sample your own sounds. However, since SampleCell can use standard Windows .WAV files to create its instruments, you can use any decent 16‑bit MPC soundcard (say, a Turtle Beach Tahiti) to record the raw sample data. An even better approach is to buy a soundcard that has an S/PDIF interface (like the CardD from Digital Audio Labs) and transfer the audio from your CD player or DAT machine entirely in the digital domain.

Hard Facts

SampleCell II PC is a fairly impressive piece of sample technology, offering 32‑note polyphony and up to 32 megabytes of sample memory (RAM) all crammed onto a full‑length, 16‑bit ISA card. This RAM — which needs to be 4Mb Apple Macintosh‑type 30‑pin SIMMs (Single In‑line Memory Module) — needs to be loaded onto the card before it is installed in the PC. One important point for users of DX2, DX4 and Pentium PCs is that these models usually have a fan fitted to the processor chip. Since the processor is usually situated underneath where the expansion cards overhang the motherboard, this fan can reduce the number of full length slots available in the PC. So, before you consider buying a SampleCell II (or any full‑length card), it'd be a good idea to check that you have a free 16‑bit slot that doesn't foul the processor fan, by taking the top off your PC and looking inside.

The SampleCell II card comes without any RAM, which means that you have to buy some SIMMs separately before you can use the card. Digidesign will not supply the RAM, claiming that they are not in the business of selling memory, and that you can probably buy the SIMMs on the open market at a lower price than they could ever hope to achieve. This last point is probably true, but I find the whole business rather curious, for a number of reasons. Firstly, it seems strange that Digidesign are content to sell a product that will not work out of the box, requiring (possibly non‑technically minded) users to install delicate electronic components into the card. It is interesting to note that Digidesign UK were not keen to let me install the RAM myself, rather insisting on sending someone to pick up the card, so that their technical staff could install the RAM and deliver the card back to me. If Digidesign don't trust me — a fairly technical bear — to install the RAM, what chance does someone have who has no technical background?

Also, the insistence on the use of Macintosh RAM means that even experienced PC users are immediately in deep water when it comes to finding suppliers of such RAM. When I was checking prices, the simple question 'What kind of Mac memory is required?' left me more or less stumped. This may leave hardened Mac users rolling in the aisles with laughter, but I would have reservations about trusting the salesperson to get it right, especially as they are unlikely to know much (if anything) about the SampleCell card. I would have thought the SampleCell designers could have allowed the use of PC SIMMs; after all, the Turtle Beach Tropez card can take a variety of SIMMs types, even a mixture of capacities. This may seem to be a fairly trivial concern, but most hardware problems occur during the installation and increasing the complication factor is not a recipe for happy customers. I would have thought that Digidesign could at least have provided the option of purchasing their card with the minimum memory configuration pre‑installed. I wonder what the reaction would be if Akai or Roland released a sample playback module with no memory?

Installation

Having sorted out the memory issue, the installation into a 486SX/33 PC went very smoothly with the default settings working first time. Unlike nearly all other types of soundcard, SampleCell II doesn't need to use a PC interrupt line (ie. IRQ), which simplifies the installation process considerably. The only hardware setting you need to worry about is the I/O address, which defaults to 34F — a fairly uncommon value, so it shouldn't clash with anything else you may have installed in your PC. The PC used for the review already contained a Gravis Ultrasound card (which also emulates a SoundBlaster) and a Future Domain SCSI card, neither of which clashed with the SampleCell card.

The software comes on a single floppy and uses the familiar Windows Setup routine to load the SampleCell control panel and the MIDI device driver that allows the card to be used with any Windows sequencer. There are also two extra floppies, containing a couple of sampled instruments (violins, drums) that allow you to test the installation and generally get started. Digidesign strongly advise that the PC is fitted with a CD‑ROM drive, so that you can use the library of instrument samples provided on the two CD‑ROMs which are bundled with the card. The CD‑ROM in question doesn't need to be particularly fast, since it's just used as a mass storage medium, with the samples always being loaded into SampleCell's RAM memory before use.

The final part of the installation process is the connection of the card into your audio system. Since SampleCell II has eight individual audio outputs, most users will connect it to a mixing desk of some kind. The audio outputs are taken out of the card's mounting bracket via four stereo 6.5mm jack sockets, so you can use standard insert leads [available from SOS Mail Order incidentally] to break this into eight mono sends for connecting to your mixing desk. Once connected, you can match the audio outputs to your desk using the 'Test SampleCell' dialogue box, which puts out a (very loud, 96dB) sine wave. This dialogue also allows you to test that the SampleCell hardware is operating correctly.

In Action

Operation of the SampleCell II PC control panel revolves around the Bank window, which shows the instruments currently loaded into the soundcard's memory (see the 'Samples, Instruments & Banks' side panel to learn how sounds are put together). Each instrument that appears in the Bank window has a separate control panel. This is laid out rather like a channel strip on a mixing desk, with fader and pan controls, output assign button, and MIDI settings. The layout suggests that, although SampleCell II has eight individual outputs, it has been designed to be used as four stereo instruments. This doesn't stop you from creating eight mono instruments and then using the pan control and output selection buttons to assign them to an individual output — if you wanted to create a drum kit with individual outputs, for instance.

In conjunction with the supplied CD‑ROMs, SampleCell II becomes useful almost immediately, since there is quite a wide range of pre‑prepared banks and instruments available. You can tweak the banks and save them to your hard disk as new banks, either keeping the samples in the original location or copying them all to your hard disk. Using the bank mechanism, you can create a multitimbral bank for a particular song, and archive the SampleCell setup to disk along with any sequence data etc. This gives you the ability to return to the project at a later date without the hassle of having to remember the exact system setup at the time you created the sequence.

Sequencing Samplecell

You use SampleCell in the same way as you would any external sample replay device. The installation process adds a MIDI driver to Windows that will appear in your sequencer's list of MIDI devices. The SampleCell control panel will happily run concurrently with sequencing software, so that you can flit between the two applications to tweak the bank or instrument configuration as you develop your sequence — rather in the same way you might use the front panel controls of an external sampler in the course of a session. If you are running short of memory on your PC, you can close down the SampleCell control software after loading up the sounds, but you get a far more responsive system if you leave it in memory all the time.

Creating Your Own Instruments

The most powerful aspect of any sampler is the ability to use your own samples to create custom instruments. Creating a new instrument from scratch is no trivial task and not something you'll do very often, but it's comforting to know that you can do it if you wish to. SampleCell II can't take any part in the creation of the raw samples or the initial cleaning up of the sample data, since it has no recording or sample editing capability. However, since it uses the standard Windows WAV format, you can record the samples using any 16‑bit MPC soundcard that implements a 44.1kHz sample rate, and then use a Windows WAV editor (eg. Wave for Windows) to create a 'clean' sample.

Once you've got the samples on disk, SampleCell provides a comprehensive set of tools to forge the raw samples into a complete instrument. There are six basic editing screens used in the instrument creation process, all accessible from the tool bar in the Bank window:

• Sample Map
• Misc. Parameters
• Envelope
• Matrix
• Modulators
• Trackers

While there really isn't scope here to go into great detail, briefly, the Sample Map is used to associate the samples to a range of MIDI keys (or key group) as well as defining the velocity zones that allow you to select between different samples, depending on how hard you hit the key, so you can have 'soft' and 'hard' samples for each key group. In fact, you can have up to 60 key groups and six velocity zones, limited only by the amount of memory installed on your SampleCell II card. Other facilities available here are the ability to tune the samples, define the crossfades between velocity zones, and controlling the relative volumes of the samples.

Most of the other facilities relate to controlling the 'instrument' as a whole — such as defining the ADSR envelope, the effect of modulation, the control of the ramp generator and the Tracker. The various generators and external MIDI parameters — such as velocity and MIDI controllers — can be directed to control various aspects of the SampleCell replay circuitry, using the Matrix dialogue. This can be thought of as a patchbay that allows you to define the way a performance parameter (such as MIDI note velocity) or one of the generators can affect the sound of an instrument, and is a good example of the advantages of using a computer‑based application over an external stand‑alone sampler.

Conclusion

SampleCell II is probably the only sensible choice of a sample replay soundcard for the PC musician working in a serious audio production environment. Its eight separate audio outputs put it on a par with stand‑alone samplers and provide the ability to apply external effects and EQ to the resulting sounds. Sound quality is excellent, though I found that the outputs were somewhat noisier than those on my Akai S950 sampler. This was improved by switching off the video monitor, which I had situated right next to the PC. Under normal conditions this shouldn't be a problem, as long as you get the gain structure of your audio system right, a point that is emphasised in the SampleCell manual. However, in terms of sound quality, I would be surprised if any PC‑based card could compete with a good stand‑alone sampler, since this will always be affected by the PC's power supply and other factors beyond the control of the card designer.

The software interface of SampleCell II is very well designed, with a clear logical hierarchy and without any of the idiosyncratic features found on samplers with more limited user interfaces. The structure of the editing software allows you to use the system either as a production sampler or as a sound design tool, as you require. The ability to create banks for a particular project and then archive them off to a new location is a particular boon to anyone who needs to come back to a piece of work after weeks or months. The only major deficiency I found was that the bank loading software doesn't first check that there's enough memory available for the audio data when loading. This means that you can get 90% through this rather lengthy process before being told that there's not enough memory available on the card [aaarrrgh!!!], at which point all the samples that have been loaded into its RAM are unloaded again, leaving you back at the starting point.

SampleCell II is not a particularly cheap option when compared to a secondhand MIDI sampler (or the new Akai S2000), unless you consider what you would pay for the sound design software that's bundled with it. There are a few hidden costs you need to be aware of when considering SampleCell II PC, such as the sample RAM, for which you'd expect to pay around £100 (inc VAT) per 4Mb SIMM. So if you go for the recommended minimum configuration of 16Mb of sample RAM, you will need to budget for an extra £400, which is not a trivial amount in my book. Also, if you want to record your own sample data then you'll need to buy either a decent 16‑bit soundcard (around £300 for a Turtle Beach Tahiti, say) or a digital interface (around £400 for a digital‑only CardD) plus sample editing software. Still, if you want to 'get serious' about using your PC in the studio, then SampleCell II PC is certainly worth a good, hard look.