Monday, March 03 2008 @ 04:21 PM EST Contributed by: sde
This week we'll look at what's been going on recently with LinuxSampler, a very cool software audio sampler. I have to say at the outset that this article was tough to write, I was just having far too much fun with the program.
The modern studio sampler is an electronic musical instrument related to the digital audio synthesizer. The synthesizer creates its sounds from a set of audio synthesis parameters, but a sampler uses a recording of an actual sound as the basis for its sound-creation functions. Like the synthesizer, the sampled sound can be transformed and modulated by envelopes, LFOs, special effects, and other sound-shaping functions.
Unfortunately a single sample from an instrument is insufficient material for a convincing recreation of the sound of that instrument over its entire musical range. Thus, multisample libraries were developed that include dozens or even hundreds of recordings of an instrument sampled in different playing ranges, with different articulations and idiomatic performance techniques (bowing, embouchures, plucking) to more accurately represent the sonic possibility of the real instrument, while realtime MIDI control of parameters such as filter cutoff values and LFO rate added greater realism to the sound.
