Samplers / Sampling

Korg give their creative real-time effects processor a face-lift, adding new algorithms, extra sampling power, and tempo-matching facilities.

Akai's MPC sampling workstations have been a studio fixture for nearly 15 years, and the MPC4000 is the most powerful one yet. But the world of sampling has changed dramatically since the MPC2000XL was released. Can an MPC still cut it in the 21st century?

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?

Many people consider software samplers to have consigned the hardware equivalent to history. Not Akai, who have responded by releasing their best-value hardware samplers ever, offering unprecedented levels of computer integration, and packing them with user-friendly features.

Korg's Trinity and Triton have led the workstation market for so long that updating the concept can't have been easy — after all, how do you improve the best? So what's new in the Triton Studio, and will it keep Korg ahead?

The latest addition to Boss & Roland's SP phrase sampler range, the SP505, is crammed full of sample-editing options and dance/hip-hop-oriented ROM sounds, and continues the current trend towards ever-expanding feature sets.

Yamaha' s cutting-edge reverberation processor uses convolution techniques to sample the ambience of real acoustic environments, allowing extremely accurate simulations.

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.

The market for hardware samplers may be on the wane, but Emu aren't abandoning their hardware customers; their RFX32 effects/mixer card can add tremendous processing and routing power to any of their Ultra samplers.

The unique C-Loops from Red Sound Systems can automatically detect the tempo of incoming audio, sample it and chop it to length ready for re‑triggering, as well as automatically timestretching all its on‑board loops to match any new tempo it receives.