XLN Audio

Having democratised the acoustic drum kit
ROMpler with Addictive Drums 2 (9/10,
207), Swedish developers XLN Audio are
looking to make their mark in the electronic
percussion arena with their latest release, XO. Its
innovative, ambitious sample browser and
inviting step sequencer certainly grab attention,
but is there substance behind all that style?
The final frontier
To kick of with a very big number, XO (VST/AU/
AAX/Standalone) houses over 8000 richly
varied and largely excellent one-shot drum and
percussion samples. Adding your own (they
don’t have to be drums, natch), however, is as
simple as selecting as many folders on your
hard drive as you like in the import dialogue,
upon which their contents are scanned and fully
integrated into XO’s library. This huge
aggregated sample pool is navigated within the
XO Space, a zoomable, scrollable ‘constellation’
interface, in which every sample is represented
as a coloured dot by instrument type (red for
kicks, blue for snares, etc), and similar sounds
are spatially grouped via the magic of, er,
t-Distributed Stochastic Neighbour Embedding.
Dragging the mouse pointer in the XO Space
triggers and selects every sample it passes over,
and the basic idea is to sweep quickly around
until you ind a sound you like, then zoom in and
drag across other samples nearby to check out
similar alternatives, or click directly in the
15-strong Similarity List below, where you can
also ‘favourite’ samples for browser iltering. The
ield is narrowed using the Search & Filter
popup, which facilitates iltering by name, type
and folder, as well as slider-governed ranges for
Frequency, Length and Drumminess, the last
being a measure of general percussive
sensibility, and is astounding in its intelligence.
Clearly, the accuracy of the import analysis
algorithm in assigning instrument types to
XLN Audio
XO €180
This high-concept drum machine puts many thousands of one-shot
samples at your beck and call within a truly cosmic interface
ENVELOPE
Shape Transient, Hold
and Decay stages
SIMILARITY LIST
Instant access to 14
sounds similar to the
one loaded
XO SPACE
Every dot is a
sample, grouped
by type and
similarity
SEQUENCER
The editable
sequencer lane for
the selected sound
EDIT
Open the Edit view
for sequencing and
sound design
HOTSWAP
Replace each sound
‘in place’ while the
beat plays
SEARCH & FILTER
Thin out the XO Space to
find your perfect sample
SAMPLE
CONTENT
Add as
many folders
as you like!
EXPORT
Drag audio and MIDI
direct to your DAW
SHORTLIST
Temporarily store
sounds here for
instant recall
KIT
VISUALISATION
View and switch
through similar kits
samples is crucial in all this, and we can report
that XO is very impressive in this regard. There
are anomalies, as you’d expect, but they’re
surprisingly few and far between.
Once you’ve made your choice, drag the
sample directly out of the GUI to your OS or
DAW, or assign it into one of the eight circular
sound ‘pads’ on the left to build up a kit. You can
then hotswap samples via the XO Space and
Similarity List, and use the Kit Visualisation
panel to step through entire similar kits.
Selecting a sound reveals a strip of adjustable
parameters at the bottom of the GUI. These
mirror that sound’s channel in the multi-channel
Edit view, which forms the other ‘half’ of XO…
Steps ahead
The Edit view brings together collective editing
and sequencing (though you can use XO as a
static MIDI-triggered sound source) of the whole
kit, with eight lanes replicating the per-sound
94 / COmputer musiC / August 2019
> reviews / xln audio xo
CMU271.rev_xo.indd 94 24/05/2019 11:14