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28 September 2005

SampleRobot review — Computer Music

Filed under: Music software at 8:31 pm Comments Off on SampleRobot review — Computer Music
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SampleRobot is a sampler designed to automatically sample MIDI instruments. It effectively lets you copy your hardware instruments onto your computer, which will save space if nothing else. Computer Music magazine reviews this program and says, “SampleRobot is like the second engineer you always wished you had. We’ve seen other programs that work along similar lines, but none of them are as complete as this one.” They like its ease of use — you connect everything up, select parameters for which notes and patches you want to sample, then “a tap of the record button sets the app to work. It tells your outboard gear which patches and notes to sound and records the results.”

So SampleRobot not only reocrds the notes like an other sampler, it actually plays them too — that’s the “Robot” part. It even works on non-MIDI hardware too, such as older analogue synths and even acoustic instruments. In this case, SampleRobot can’t play the notes for you, but it tells you when and what to play, even providing a countdown to ensure accuracy. As the review says, “very useful indeed.”

Once everything is sampled, SampleRobot can also automatically create loop points and crossfade them. They say this automatic detection is not perfect but is a good starting point for manual tweaking.

SampleRobot scores a solid 8 out of 10. “If sampling is a crucial part of your work, you’ll consider it a bargain.”

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