Put it in your CD player and it's useless. Put it in an Ensoniq ASR-10 or EPS-16 sampler and it might knock your socks off. A sockless Ian Masterson writes...

When it comes to feeding your sampler from a library of sounds, you can't beat a CD-ROM drive. Hard drives might be fast, but CD-ROMs operate like lightning and are much more reliable. Of course, you can't save your own data to this particular format, but with more and more sampler owners relying on sample CDs and third-party disks to form the mainstay of their sound collections, it seems entirely logical to produce a single disk that offers several thousand sounds in a purely read-only configuration.

Ensoniq are showing their commitment to supporting the ASR-10 and EPS-16 units by releasing the CDR-1, a CD-ROM literally brimming over with high-quality sounds. In fact, a quick glance through the booklet that accompanies the disc reveals just how many sounds Ensoniq are giving CDR-1 owners access to. Numbered from 1101 to 9705, each sample is formatted ready to load into one of the sampler's Instruments, and can be accessed immediately through a proprietary Macro-Dialling system. All you have to do is hold down the sampler's Load button, enter the number of the sound you want on the numeric keypad, and the CDR skips straight to the correct sound. From there, it's simply a matter of selecting which Instrument you wish the sound to occupy, and confirming your selection.

For review purposes, I used a DAC RW4000II drive, which yielded excellent results. The whole process of loading a sample takes a matter of seconds.

Ensoniq have also supplied several banks of demo songs, for you to audition some of the sounds in context, and a section entitled 'Bonus Beats', containing a collection of individual drum and percussion sequences. Using the ASR-10's sequence functions you can arrange and compile these sequences into complete songs. Nifty.

But the last word, as usual, has to go to the quality of the sounds themselves. It's probably true to say that sound libraries produced by sampler manufacturers tend to be slightly 'conservative' in their selection and choice of sounds; after all, they have to cater for as broad a range of end-users as possible. However, the CDR-1 offers so many high quality, instantly usable sounds that any inherent conservatism becomes irrelevant; at the end of the day, the rich strings, dynamic percussion and superb effects (among others) make this CD-ROM an indispensable source of essential samples for any Ensoniq owner.

THE LAST WORD