The VIP track window is Samplitude’s main editing screen.

SEK’D’s extra attention to harnessing CPU resources with Samplitude’s performance-enhancing utilities made for better-than-average throughput on my “aging” 200MHz Pentium, lightning quick response on a 500MHz Pentium III, and zero-latent lightspeed on a dual-700MHz P-III system with multiple RAID drives. I installed Samplitude and two SEK’D I/O cards (Siena and Prodif 96 Pro) in each, and though my old Gateway required several install attempts before working, everything was eventually up and running smoothly. Installation was the epitome of plug and play on the other two systems, and Samplitude ran like a rock on all three, with impressive, great-sounding audio results all around.

Sam 2496 recordings are either RAM- or disk-based Virtual Projects (VIPs) that allow as many tracks per song as the installed hardware can handle. RAP (RAM Project) songs are well-suited for looped-based composers and those working with shorter segments of audio, such as broadcast engineers, but the majority of Samplitude’s tracking and editing work is done in hard-disk based projects (HDPs). Destructive and nondestructive editing modes are available, allowing the user to permanently alter raw audio files or simply modify the onscreen objects representing them. Sampling rates of 11.025, 22.05, 32, 44.1, 48, 88.2, 96, 176.4 and 192 kHz are supported (resolution is limited only by hardware), to suit any audio requirement.

A Sample ‘Tude Session
The VIP track window (see Fig. 1) is the heart of Samplitude, and it’s quite the button-happy jumping off point to a wide range of effect, MIDI, crossfade, locate, zoom and other helpful modules. There are no fewer than 80 buttons lining the top, bottom, left and right sides of the interface on the toolbars and display, yet I found even a 15-inch monitor was room enough to navigate Samplitude’s efficiently ergonomic interface. Its compact yet uncluttered design puts a lot at mousetip without going overboard, and the toolbars can be left floating in the windows or “docked” into perfect horizontal and vertical positions along the edge of the workspace.

The cool gray workspace is a good backdrop to each track’s mute, solo, lock, pan/volume curve and record buttons, horizontal level/pan faders and peak hold meters, and particularly to the colorful Comparisonic object waveform displays (more on this later). The user-programmable screen, zoom and sample view buttons at the lower left of the VIP GUI make it very quick and easy to jump around, such as going from a microscopically zoomed-in view of a verse to a wide-angle look at the entire song with just one click.

Arming a track and punching Record brings up a handy record parameter box with L/R input meters, sample rate toggles, sound card routing options, remaining time and disk space readouts and mono/stereo mode buttons en route to recording the track. Once recorded, the audio appears in the track sequencer window as an object with five handles to change its level, fade in, fade out and left/right resize markers.

Right-clicking on any recorded object affords a dazzling array of edit options that are specific to that object only; this is one of Samplitude’s strongest features, and I’ll cover it in more depth below. Each VIP track channel has volume and pan automation curves (in yellow and turquoise, respectively) that are easily distinguishable and a pleasure to draw on at any screen resolution. I was pleased with the results my overchallenged Pentium achieved, and Samplitude’s new mouse scrub mode is about as close to a real jog/shuttle wheel as a mouse can get on the faster systems I used. Cutting and pasting pieces of audio is very precise, and Samplitude’s bendably useful fade/crossfade curve editors provide more ways to fade into and out of an audio segment than I thought possible.

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Reprinted with permission from Magazine, August, 2000
© 2000, Intertec Publishing, A Primedia Company All Rights Reserved