Samplers / Sampling

Users of Propellerhead's Recycle could be forgiven for thinking that sample slicing couldn't get much easier, but Bitshift Audio's pHATmatik Pro aims to prove them wrong by offering an unprecedented level of integration with MIDI + Audio sequencers.

Although Native Instruments' Reaktor has offered sampling options for some time, it's taken the company a while to produce a dedicated software sampler: Kontakt. Can it make headway in what has become a crowded market?

The latest technological advances in reverb design have yielded expensive hardware units that can 'sample' the sound of real rooms. Now Audio Ease's Altiverb brings the same convolving technology to the Mac — at a fraction of the cost.

Software samplers are revolutionising studio recording, but can they replace their hardware counterparts in live performance? Jazz keyboardist Django Bates is in the process of finding out...