Take this budget sampling software and a Yamaha SY85 synth and you have a cheap way of downloading your own sounds into your instrument's RAM. Derek Johnson reveals all...

Say the word 'sampler' to the nearest hi-tech musician and more often than not the reply will be 'Akai', 'Roland' or 'Emu', followed by the model number of their dedicated hardware sampling devices. I'll bet that even computer owners would seldom mention software as their first or second thought.

Of course, sample editing on computer (courtesy of established programs such as Steinberg's Avalon for the Atari ST and Digidesign's Sound Designer for the Mac) is a fact of life for many serious musicians, yet the actual act of sampling with the computer is not that widespread. This may not be too surprising, given that most sampling software/hardware combinations have been aimed at games programmers or 'hobbyists' who are content with crunchy 8-bit sound quality. That's not to say that such software isn't fun — it is — or that it doesn't provide experience in manipulating sound that will be valuable when such users graduate to a 'proper' sampler. But for serious use, this type of product often has serious shortcomings.

These were my thoughts when I got my hands on a copy of Microdeal's Replay 16 sampler for the Atari ST. Microdeal have been responsible for many exceedingly popular 8- and 12-bit samplers for the Atari ST (and the Amiga), so a full 16-bit sampler seemed a logical move for them. However, Replay 16 still exuded an aura of being aimed at computer buffs rather than at musicians — but I'll state right now that this impression didn't last once I started using the software.

My own reason for checking out Replay 16 is simple. I was between samplers and had recently bought a Yamaha SY85 workstation synth. One of the plus points of the SY85 is that it comes supplied with half a meg of user-fillable sample RAM (expandable to 3.5MB), which I thought would expand the capabilities of whatever sampler I was to get in the future. Seeing that Replay 16 could transfer samples over MIDI SDS (Sample Dump Standard) gave me a few ideas: no matter how the software behaved, it would allow me to sample and dump the results into the SY85. To my surprise, I found that Replay 16 is not only a well-written and easy to use package, with many useful and powerful features, it sounds pretty good too.

THE PACKAGE

The Replay 16 package comes with a sampling cartridge and four disks containing the main Editor, two further programs (Drumbeat and MIDIPlay) and loads of samples. Make copies of the master disks (or install them onto your hard drive), make sure the cartridge is firmly plugged into your Atari's dongle port, and you're ready to sample.

The cartridge incorporates a pair of phono sockets, one of which is the sampling input and the other the output. Phono sockets aren't ideal — nor is the fiddly input gain control — and to be honest they are a little exposed, but take care and you shouldn't have any problems. Samples can also be auditioned through your ST monitor's speaker, although this obviously doesn't sound too good and isn't available for all sampling frequencies.

SAMPLING

Sampling itself is very simple:

• Select a sampling frequency (see box for list of available frequencies)

• Create a new sample (any length, up to all the available RAM — see box for how much sampling time you can expect), and take your mouse to the lower left-hand corner of the main editor screen.

• Amongst the tape recorder-like controls is a record button. Click on it.

• Sampling can be done automatically, subject to a trigger threshold, or continuously. This latter facility is similar to that found on Roland samplers, whereby the computer is constantly sampling the input and you stop the process when you've sampled what you want. While the sample needs to be trimmed afterwards, this is still a quick way to sample.

• Once the sample is in memory, save it to disk. This is the only way to give it a name, and any edits that you might make will be completely destructive — there is no Undo function anywhere within Replay 16. Be warned.

EDITING

Now that a sample is available to edit, a number of icons appear in the grey section at the bottom of the screen — this is the Block Control Panel, and gives you access to various functions without recourse to the menu bar. Mark, Edit, Zoom In (to single sample resolution) and Out, and Looping are the first controls you'll see, and when you start chopping the sample, you'll also get Cut, Paste, Copy and Insert options. The tape analogy is echoed in these icons, and the whole feel of the program is very much of working with linear lengths of tape, which gives it a friendly feel. It is, of course, much easier than actually working with tape!

The Edit menu contains many more sample manipulation options, all of them well implemented and easy to use. The volume of a sample (or section of a sample) can be increased or decreased, and samples can be faded in and/or out, reversed or combined (Replay calls it Overlaying). Empty sections can be placed within samples, and sections can be erased. One unexpected function is called SFX, whereby a number of preset effects (various reverbs, delays, or flanging) can be added to a sample. The effect then becomes a part of the sample; while parameters are minimal, the results can be quite interesting.

Looping is definitely a strong point of Replay 16, since you can see samples in such minute detail on your ST's screen. If you find that you can't get a loop absolutely perfect manually, then Replay offers a smoothing option called Loop Fade. While adding to the length of the sample in the process, the results are great: an OK loop often becomes excellent and a dodgy loop is often rescued. The smoothing of the loop point might still be obvious in a dodgy example, but the result is never unpleasant, often adding to the character of the finished sound.

One further advanced feature is the digital filter, which is available in two versions. One works relatively quickly yet isn't as accurate as the slower alternative, which offers more precise results at the cost of taking a lot more time to do the job. A Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) option not only provides you with an extremely attractive plot of your sample, but allows you to decide exactly which frequency bands you'd like to boost, cut or eliminate. The filter is a very powerful tool for such cost-effective software.

While Replay 16 isn't a stereo sampler, stereo samples can be edited, with many exclusive editing features. I wasn't able to try these out properly since I didn't have a stereo sampler to dump the edits back into. A number of STE replay options are available, however.

WORKING METHOD

My own technique for using Replay 16 involves assigning a large chunk of memory (my ST has been upgraded to 4MB RAM) to a sample, sampling at 44.1kHz or 48kHz for maximum fidelity, topping and tailing the sample and finally looping it. I save the sample to disk as a safeguard against mistakes, and then commence resampling. This is a little laborious, but allows me to weigh fidelity against memory — lower bandwidth samples take up less memory but are less faithful to the original sound. In practice, I found that most samples can be resampled down as far as 22kHz and sometimes 16kHz without aliasing becoming too much of a problem. How far I go depends very much on the context or high frequency content of the finished sample. I've tried everything from blocks of backing vocals to drum loops, to real instruments and sound effects, even going so far as to spin some backing vocals into a track direct from the sampling cartridge — it sounded great. Sample reproduction at higher bandwidths is bright and sparkly, and at the crunchy end of the scale the samples gain character, although 5.5kHz may be of little use to anyone.

In use, I have no real complaints about Replay 16, especially given its asking price. But playing devil's advocate does turn up certain compromises. The major problem is speed, or rather the lack of it. Certainly Replay can't be blamed for the sluggishness inherent in the MIDI Sample Dump Standard, and the excessive processing time occasionally necessary for treating samples — especially large ones — is probably the fault of the Atari itself. Deleting material from the start of a sample, no matter how small a chunk, takes ages, although I suspect this is a result of the computer reallocating the resulting sample to the available memory. This is very efficient but still irksome. That said, most hardware samplers exhibit some rather sluggish habits as well.

Other significant compromises occur due to slight fudges with sampling rates. Due to hardware restrictions within the Atari, sampling rates aren't exact whole numbers — rather than 22kHz or 32kHz, for example, the real sampling rates are 21.942kHz or 32.336kHz. This results in slight pitch anomalies when samples are transferred over to your synth (or sampler), since it is expecting round figures — a little bit of tweaking at the destination is all that is needed.

Apart from that, I got to wondering why Yamaha didn't provide the SY85 with a high density disk drive — since it can hold 3.5MB of RAM (mine now has 2.5MB), and a double density (720k) floppy can only store one 'ALL' file with half a meg of samples. At moments such as these, one starts dreaming of Kurzweil K2000s, SCSI connections and hard drives...

On the hardware front, I found that Replay 16's sampling cartridge emitted a quiet but noticeable high pitched whine. Consulting with AVR (the designers) revealed that this problem doesn't occur with all equipment; in fact, since it was designed for domestic rather than studio use, the problem didn't occur until people started using Replay in personal studios. There is a solution, though: if your cartridge whines, send it back to AVR, and they can actually 'tune' it out. Future cartridges will be modified so that the problem should never happen. And while truly 16-bit, the actual analogue-to-digital convertors used in the cartridge aren't fully professional, with inevitable compromises in noise performance.

VERDICT

The majority of negative comments regarding Replay 16 can be mitigated by its low cost and overall friendliness. If they concern you, then check out the Pro Series 16 sampler, which behaves much the same as Replay 16, with the addition of superior convertors and a separate power supply (which takes nearly all of the workload off the computer), resulting in an 88dB signal-to-noise input, 95dB signal-to-noise output and precise sampling frequencies. Look out for the £350 price tag though, and sample dumping will still be slow.

The bottom line is that Replay 16 sounds great, works well, and is very user friendly. The wide variety of filtering and resampling options allow you to finely balance memory, fidelity, aliasing and noise, and beam the result into your sampler or sample RAM-laden synth. In fact, if you own an Atari and such a synth, you may wonder whether you need to invest in a sampler at all. Let's just say the thought crossed my mind as well. Add up the figures: £130 for the Replay 16 software and around £150 to upgrade an Atari to 4MB comes a long way below the nearest hardware sampler, new or secondhand. Even adding £70 to bring my SY85's RAM up to 2.5MB keeps the total outlay under £350. That kind of money would only buy a secondhand sampler (12-bit, probably) with very limited memory. From my point of view, with an SY85, I get the best of all possible worlds — high fidelity sampling, excellent synthesis facilities and bags of sample time, with the expanded memory options that I can now afford since I don't necessarily have to buy a sampler. Add to this a manual that actually encourages users to call in if they have problems, and you have a product that's a winner in many ways.

Further Information

Replay 16 £129.95 inc VAT.

Microdeal Ltd, (Contact Details).

There are two further program disks supplied with Replay 16.

• DRUMBEAT is a separate program altogether, and comes on its own disk. It provides a fast-loading, efficient shell that allows you to load samples — they have to all be at 22kHz — and record them into patterns, rather like a drum machine. A 'kit' can contain up to 30 samples, the program can hold up to 50 patterns, and a song can be up to 100 patterns in length. Limitations include 4-voice polyphony and mono output. The program is syncable to MIDI, so use of a sync code and a multitrack tape recorder would allow you to record individual parts to tape. Actually, with a little planning. Drumbeat can be used in much the same way as the Sample Sequencer, although all the sections you'd like to sequence would actually be real samples, which means memory will be used up fast. But the result is 4-voice polyphonic, so it's possible to compose more complex pieces. Note that the demo kit and song for Drumbeat is excellent; as a taster of what is possible with the software, it's a real eye-opener.

• MIDIPLAY allows your ST to emulate a sample playback module, playable from a MIDI-equipped sequencer or keyboard. Obviously, your computer can no longer run sequencing software when MIDIPlay is active, but in a budget setup this might not be a problem. Memory allowing, up to 128 samples can be held in RAM at any one time and polyphony is limited to four notes.