Sampler - Hardware or Software ?

[gilwe]

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Although I find software audio production very usefull, I feel there's nothing like powering on your hardware synth/sampler and start playing... The hassle of loading the softwares, adjusting the card, messing up with sessions and projects and suffering clicks in sound and latency problem just makes it all less pratical. For this reason I keep 7 different keyborads.

Now I want to get a hardware sampler, but as my experience is small with these, I need to know the limitation of the samplers found as second hand for about 300-500$ these days. An example would be a Yamaha A3000 or Akai S2000/3000.

Can these handle the huge samples available these days ? I know some of them uses hundreds of MB of memory. As a sampler like the Yamaha A3000 can take a HD of max 1GB (?), I can't see how it can be used for such huge sample banks.

On the other hand, there's nothing like the "switch on and play" ease you got with those hardware samplers, as well as the reliablility for live shows and sound quality (??)


What is your opinion ?

 

[hugojacquet]

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Although I find software audio production very usefull, I feel there's nothing like powering on your hardware synth/sampler and start playing... The hassle of loading the softwares, adjusting the card, messing up with sessions and projects and suffering clicks in sound and latency problem just makes it all less pratical. For this reason I keep 7 different keyborads.

Now I want to get a hardware sampler, but as my experience is small with these, I need to know the limitation of the samplers found as second hand for about 300-500$ these days. An example would be a Yamaha A3000 or Akai S2000/3000.

Can these handle the huge samples available these days ? I know some of them uses hundreds of MB of memory. As a sampler like the Yamaha A3000 can take a HD of max 1GB (?), I can't see how it can be used for such huge sample banks.

On the other hand, there's nothing like the "switch on and play" ease you got with those hardware samplers, as well as the reliablility for live shows and sound quality (??)


What is your opinion ?

I think woàrking with soft samplers is good for my work- flow. Don't have any hardware cause I am not a keyboard player (more a guitar player).

I like the one- interface and integration of soft synths and samplers give me.


maybe you should consider this:

http://www.esoundz.com/details/viewDetails.php?ProductID=217&referrer=home

this way you get Sampletank 2 Le (1 instance per session, BUT:16 midi channels and 8 stereo out's).

Here’s a link with reviews of the sonic synth 1. the pic on the site shows sonic synth 2; but it was not out at that time. The reviews are for sonic synth 1.

The engine you get is SAMPLETANK 2 LE

http://www.kvr-vst.com/get/116.html

P.S.
You can get $5 in epointz by entering a user name for the referral if you purchase.
My user name is

hugojacquet.


Just make sure you put in in the “user name” part and not the first or last name part, so enter that when you place your order. I will get $5 too thanks!

Hugo

http://stage.vitaminic.nl/hugo_jacquet

 

[metropolis79]

I've got a Yamaha A4000 and I use also both kontakt and halion.
Soft samplers could import practically everything. old akai libraries and the new ones (Giga, halion etc). the new libraries are very very huge, because all softsamplers allow direct hard disk streaming.
the back of the medal is that you have to work on the pc, and they are sensible to system crashes, so they're not safe for live use.
with hardware samplers you can import only the, sometimes very good, libraries. You've a solid system that never crashes, and in some cases they've integrated high quality effects.
but there are also cons: the human interface is in many cases disastrous (compared to software, of course) and there are also larger loading times.
they also don't have disk streaming, so the amount of waveform that you can load is limited by the ram that you've installed

I've to say also that in many cases the older akai libraries are more and more musical than the modern multi-gigabyte libraries...

in my case I use soft samplers in the studio, than I convert what I need and go with the hardware on the gigs...
and I'm very happy with both hardware and software solution

hope it helps