Serato

Serato Sample $79
A sideways look at slicing, Sample
has algorithms that identify
appropriate parts of a long audio file
for you when you hit the Find
Samples button, leaving you free to
play them using a keyboard
(QWERTY or MIDI). Results are hit
and miss, but with Sample you can
lock certain slices and re-randomise
the rest of the selection, helping with
the wheat-and-chaff separation. You
can also reverse playback, take hold
of basic sampling controls
(enveloping and filtering, plus
pitching and stretching), and play
polyphonically. To be honest, after
trying a lot of material in Sample,
the results weren’t as creatively
liberating as hoped. The results here
are, of course, context-dependent,
but even after putting Sample
through those contexts, it still
doesn’t quite feel like the inspiration
driver it should be. Try it with slower,
melodic material for best results.
www.serato.com
VERDICT 7.6
Accusonus Regroover
Pro £170
Regroover is all about taking
ready-made loops and messing with
them on a per-element level, thanks
to its source separation algorithms.
The idea is that you grab a drum
loop, and Regroover will do its best
to turn it into separate tracks for its
constituent elements (kick, snare,
hats, etc), which you can then slice
up and rearrange, creating variations
on your loop. This loop separation
works well in terms of isolation – you
won’t get a perfect kick/snare/
percussion divide most of the time,
but there are helpful fine-tuning
parameters to tweak the analysis and
combine tracks together, and the
quality is on par with the best source
Creative samplers
No Kontakt or EXS-24 here – these are the lighter-
weight workstations for old-school or thoroughly
creative sampling
Togu Audio Line TAL-
Sampler £47
Vintage sampling is the order of the day here. Sure, you’ve got four
layers of sample-loading, three envelopes, three LFOs, and EQ, delay
and reverb units on output, but the point behind TAL-Sampler is to
emulate the sound of early sampling tech – E-mu, Akai and so on – with
fine-tuning of properties like jitter, sample rate, converter quality and
more. Classic digital machines are emulated, right down to the DACs
with their idiosyncracies in tow. What you also get are some classic
’80s/’90s sampled presets, with a Factory collection and an additional
collection from Hollow Sun, giving you not just an incredibly competent
tool at recreating classic sampling sounds, but also a bunch of fodder
for the sounds themselves. With most presets using just one of TAL-
Sampler’s four layers, there’s plenty of room to make them your own.
tal-software.com
VERDICT 9.2
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