Are you about to buy an expensive stand‑alone sampler? Think again. If you have a PC, you already own much of the technology required for sampling. Panicos Georghiades puts the case for 'soundcard and PC'‑based sampling systems, and compares four popular soundcards.
Sampling on a PC is far cheaper than using a stand‑alone sampler. 4‑Meg PC memory chips cost between £100 and £125 at the moment, and hard disks have recently tumbled to a new low of about 40 pence per Megabyte. Furthermore, the Windows .WAV file format has become a widespread standard, and there's a multitude of .WAV file editors for digital sound on the market. These are very cheap, and it's possible you will get one free with the soundcard of your choice.
Aside from purely financial considerations, it's worth remembering that if you have a PC, then you already possess some of the components needed for sampling. You will already have a floppy disk and hard disk drive, together with a monitor, which is much more informative than the small LCD you get in a rack sampler. You may also have a CD‑ROM drive. If you have a modern 16‑bit soundcard (or are planning to buy one), you will also have A/D and D/A facilities.
So, if you're not against having a sampler that doesn't look like a 19‑inch rack box or a keyboard, consider the soundcard sampling option. In this article, I'll be looking at three; the Creative Labs SoundBlaster AWE32, the Turtle Beach Maui and Tropez, and the Gravis UltraSound Max — all of which cost around £200. Put any of these together with a reasonably powerful PC running Windows (properly), and you have a system that can change your mind about what a sampler should look like for ever — and which should cost you a lot less.
Creative Labs Soundblaster AWE32
Until recently, the SoundBlaster name was associated solely with budget soundcards and computer games. Since manufacturer Creative Labs bought Emu Systems, however, things have changed. The latest product, now a year old, is the SoundBlaster AWE32 soundcard. On board is an Emu wavetable synthesizer (into which you can load your own waveforms), a MIDI interface, a DSP chip and Reverb and Chorus effects. The card allows you to add up to 28Mb of RAM for your own samples, and is bundled with a budget version of Twelve Tone Systems Cakewalk sequencer.
- WHAT YOU GET
The on‑board wavetable synth is the Emu8000, which has 1Mb of ROM sounds. The card comes with 512K of RAM for your own sounds, but you can upgrade using Single In‑line Memory Modules (SIMMs). These are used in pairs of 1, 4, or 16Mb modules, so you can have 2, 8, or 28Mb on the card (if you use two 16Mb modules, you can't utilise the top 4Mb — hence the 28Mb RAM limit).
The AWE32 can record and play back 8‑ or 16‑bit digital audio at 11, 22, or 44.1kHz, in either stereo or mono. The card also supports a number of compression standards for speech and music, including three versions of ADPCM sound compression (note that ADPCM is only used when storing digital audio files on the hard disk — it is not related to the sampling facilities). With ADPCM, you can compress sound at a ratio of 4:1, and provided you use full bandwidth sound as your source material, there should be no apparent loss in quality. In addition, the AWE32 includes interfaces for Panasonic, Mitsumi, Creative and Sony CD‑ROM drives, so you won't need to buy an extra card when you want to buy a CD‑ROM.
On the MIDI side, there's an interface which emulates the Roland MPU401 in UART mode, but you have to buy a special connector cable (about £20) with MIDI sockets on one end to provide you with your MIDI connections, as the card itself just has a D‑type connector. The built‑in synth is 32‑note polyphonic, 16‑part multitimbral, and supports three MIDI standards — GM, GS and MT32.
In the GS mode, you get the basic 128 instruments, together with all the variations that you find in additional banks, as well as eight drum kits and an effects set (arranged as a drum kit). There are eight reverb and eight chorus settings, and you can alter the amount of signal sent from each MIDI channel to the effects. The setup is very similar, if not identical, to that on the Roland Sound Canvas. There's also an OPL3 FM synth on board, which you can use at the same time as the wavetable synthesizer to add another 11 (4‑operator) or 20 (2‑operator) voices.
The card has external stereo line in, line out, speaker/headphones out and mic in connectors, plus internal connections to a CD‑ROM for audio. The on‑board software‑controlled mixer can combine all these inputs, the output from the internal synth, and digital audio from the hard disk, and send the resulting signal to the main stereo output. Apart from a pair of stereo faders and a spectrum analyser display, the mixer features bass and treble EQ controls.
The AWE32 comes with the richest variety of bundled software of any card on the market: a budget multimedia authoring package (HSC Interactive), speech synthesis and speech recognition software, and, as mentioned earlier, Cakewalk Apprentice — the budget version of one of the top sequencers on the PC, Cakewalk Professional.
- SAMPLING ON THE AWE32
There are two programs associated with the sampling side of the AWE32: WaveStudio and Vienna SF Studio. WaveStudio lets you record and edit sounds (waveforms) and save them as Windows .WAV files. When recording from a CD‑ROM, there's an option for sync start recording.
The program is basic as far as Wave editors go, but it does include a few rare features. You can apply most of the edit functions to the left and right sound channels independently, something not available in most other programs. However, although you can adjust the gain by a percentage, there's no normalise feature. This useful function finds the highest wave peak and then scales the waveform to the point of maximum amplitude without distortion, and would have been handy here.
The special effects on offer are: Reverse, Echo, Invert, Rap! (stutter), Fade In/Out (linear only), Swap channels, Pan (left to right and vice versa), and Phase Shift, which offsets the start time of one of the two stereo channels. You can also mix two waveforms to create a third. Although you can convert waveform sampling rates and bit resolutions, there's no pitch‑shift or time stretch.
Once you have recorded a sound and saved it as a wave file (.WAV extension) using WaveStudio, you then move to the Vienna program. Here you can import wave files and create patches (a sound that can be called by a single program change from your sequencer). One or more wave files can be combined to make a patch, in a number of ways. Vienna can import only mono Wave files (unlike Turtle Beach's WavePatch, which can accept stereo files), but two files can be imported and panned left and right to create a psuedo‑stereo image.
Vienna is very similar to a synthesizer editor. You can set ADSR‑type envelopes to the pitch, filter and amplitude of imported wave files, and set loop points. You can pitch and pan sounds, pass them through oscillators, and even multi‑layer sounds by setting up keyboard splits, but not by means of velocity crossfades (again, something that WavePatch can do). Once you have finished setting patch parameters you can save all the information in a bank file on disk.
Soundblaster AWE32 £190prosUp to 28Mb RAM.Has Reverb, Chorus, Treble, Bass.Best value for money.consCannot use stereo .WAV files for the sampling section.No aftertouch.summaryTop‑of‑the‑range soundcard from Creative Labs, offering good sampling facilities and a vast range of bundled programs.
SoundBlaster AWE32 £190 inc VAT.
Turtle Beach Maui And Tropez
Turtle Beach manufacture three cards that have sampling facilities: the Maui, Tropez and Monte Carlo. The Monte Carlo uses the MIDI Sample Dump Standard to load files, and this makes it very slow. Furthermore, the card can have only 4Mb of RAM, so I chose not to include it in this review. Nevertheless, all three soundcards use the same software (Wave SE and WavePatch, of which more in a minute) — so most of the information here will also apply to the Monte Carlo anyway.
- THE MAUI
This half‑length 8/16‑bit card includes a MIDI synth, but can only play back samples. In other words, there's no built‑in facility to record digital audio, as on the other cards, so you cannot sample your own sounds. However, it happily co‑exists with any other soundcard, so you can use the Maui to expand the polyphony of your system.
The Maui comes with 512K of RAM, expandable to 8.25Mb. There are two memory slots and, as on the AWE32, you can use standard PC SIMMS — in this case 256K, 1MB, or 4MB chips. Unlike the AWE32, you can mix different sizes of SIMM — you don't have to use matching pairs. The card boasts an on‑board 32‑note polyphonic, 16‑part multitimbral GM synth with 2Mb of ROM, 128 sounds and a single drum kit.
You can use the Maui with any DOS program that works with the Roland MPU401 MIDI interface (such as Voyetra's Sequencer Plus) without requiring additional drivers. Once again, a connector cable (about £20) is necessary to provide your MIDI connections — but the connector cable for the Maui has a MIDI Thru port as well as In/Out sockets. Apart from MIDI, the only two external connections to the card are a stereo in (which acts as an auxiliary in for mixing other external signals) and a stereo out.
- THE TROPEZ
This is supposed to be Turtle Beach's answer to the AWE32, and has similar facilities at a similar price. However, the Tropez is closer to the Maui when it comes to the internal synth and sampling facilities. These are based on very similar chips, and the same software (Wave SE and WavePatch). You can think of the Tropez as a Maui with the addition of digital audio recording, a CD‑ROM interface, and the option of adding up to 12Mb of RAM.
The Tropez was designed to offer facilities you would find on a standard soundcard. The MIDI interface is via a games 'D' connector, and as with the AWE32, the MIDI connector cables are extra. The card has a single IDE‑type CD‑ROM interface, and three slots for sample RAM. As with the Maui you can use 256K, 1Mb and 4Mb SIMMs in any combination. Apart from the MIDI and joystick connections, there's a stereo line in, aux in, mic in and a line out. The internal GM synth has 128 sounds and a single drum kit.
- SAMPLING ON THE MAUI AND TROPEZ
Both the Maui and the Tropez come with Wave SE (Sample Editor) and WavePatch. Wave SE is a special version of Turtle Beach's Wave for Windows editing program. It does not have all the digital effects available in the full version, but does include additional features for editing samples — for example, you can create loop points and download samples straight into the Maui or the Tropez. You can edit four different .WAV files at the same time, and import a variety of file formats, including raw PCM, SampleVision (.SMP), Macintosh AIF and Microsoft ADPCM.
Editing functions include Fade In/Out (with the option of exponential curves), Gain Adjust, Mute, Equalise (which offers 15 presets and a 4‑band parametric equaliser), Frequency Analysis, Mix (for combining up to four wave files), Crossfade, Reverse, Invert, and Time Compress/Expand. The last of these has three accuracy levels, and in a quick test, the high accuracy option took over three minutes to stretch a 25‑second file to 60 seconds.
You can view the waveform at a variety of zoom levels, and when zoomed right in, a draw tool enables you to sketch in raw sound data. This can be useful for removing unwanted noise. Looping is handled very well — the program can find a zero point, and automatically seek out the next one. When you finish editing a wave file, you can save it to disk, or send it straight to the synth for auditioning as an instrument sound.
Patch editing and management is handled by WavePatch, which displays a table of the patches stored in the synth. Double‑clicking on a patch name brings up various windows showing the settings for that patch. These include multi‑layering options, keyboard and velocity splits, and envelope, LFO and modulation settings.
There are more options included here than those in Vienna for the AWE32, and they are a bit more sophisticated — you can have real‑time control using MIDI aftertouch, breath and foot controllers, as well as the modulation controllers offered by Vienna. You can use stereo wave files as a source, and create keyboard splits using Note On velocity as well as note number. On the other hand, Vienna does allow more than four waves to be combined into a single patch, and has facilities for creating effects like Wah Wah.
Turtle Beach Maui £189prosSimple installation.Good MIDI implementation.Very comprehensive sample editing.Can import stereo waveforms.MIDI Thru.consNo sample record facility.summarySample playback‑only soundcard, ideally suited for use alongside a second, sampling, soundcard.
Turtle Beach Tropez £249prosGood MIDI implementation.Very comprehensive sample editing.Can use stereo waveforms as samples.12Mb RAM.consNo Reverb or Chorus.Only one type of CD‑ROM interface.summaryWell‑specified sampling soundcard with comprehensive editing software. Ideal for multimedia applications.
Maui £189 inc VAT.
Tropez £249 inc VAT.
Tropez £249 inc VAT.
Et Cetera, Unit 17, Hardmans Business Centre, Rawtenstall, Lancs BB4 6HH.
Gravis Ultrasound Max
The Gravis UltraSound Max offers yet another option for sampling on the PC. Although the card is, in general terms, very good, and offers 48kHz digital audio and ADPCM sound compression, its sampling facilities are not as sophisticated as those available on the other cards. For this reason, I am not dedicating as much space to it, since this is an article about sampling, rather than a full‑blown product round up.
The Ultrasound has 512K of RAM on board, and is only upgradeable to 1Mb. Connections include line in, mic in, line out and speaker/headphones out, as well as a MIDI/joystick 'D' connector. Amongst the comprehensive selection of bundled software is MidiSoft's Recording Session sequencer/notation package, and Howling Dog Systems Power Chords, a wonderful guitar‑based composition program.
For wave editing, the UltraSound package includes Wave Lite (a cut‑down version of Turtle Beach's Wave), and UltraSound Studio. The latter is pretty comprehensive, with effects like Echo, Reverb, Reverse, Fade, Mix (for combining two wave files) and Time Compress/Expand. For patch editing, the Ultrasound package includes Patch Manager and Patch Maker Lite. This has features for editing envelopes, stereo balance, tremolo and vibrato, and for tuning and looping.
Overall, the package is pretty good, but the 1Mb RAM limit is restrictive.
Gravis Ultrasound Max £269pros48kHz recording.Bundled with Power Chords composition software.Includes a CD‑ROM with games and other utilities.consSampling memory only expandable to 1Mb.summaryA basic multimedia soundcard with fairly comprehensive sample editing facilities, somewhat hampered by its 1Mb sample RAM limit, but bundled with some fine software.
Ultrasound Max £269.08.
Conclusion
This article was not intended to present a full and comprehensive review of the complete facilities offered by these soundcards. Its main purpose was to put forward the case for sampling on a PC, using any of the soundcards mentioned here.
I hope that what you've read has convinced you that this method is cheaper and not necessarily less sophisticated than using a stand‑alone sampler. As for which of the cards mentioned here is the best, I could not make up my mind. The Turtle Beach cards and software offer more sophisticated control, while the AWE32 allows more RAM, and bundles more software for the money. The sonic quality and specification is pretty much the same on all of them. For the record, I personally use an AWE32 and a Maui in my machine, both of which are fitted with 4Mb chips. This gives me 64‑note polyphony, four separate outs, and 16Mb of RAM — for about £900!