We would like to start the year 2025 with the best wishes from the SampleRobot team. May your hopes and dreams be fulfilled.
Over the last weeks quite a few new users reached out to us with beginner questions how to use SampleRobot for their specific needs. So this first blog entry for 2025 is all about questions that might come up when you setup your first sampling session with SampleRobot.
As you noticed after the activation SampleRobot comes up with the Project Wizard. If you experience any issues downloading or activating SampleRobot please check out the FAQ section on our support site here.
Before you start the Project Wizard or manually setup a project you need to establish connections from SampleRobot to your instrument/sound source. You need one connection at least which is audio. The audio output of your instrument must be connected to your audio interface's input(s) or via a virtual connection if it's a virtual instrument. That's right, you can also sample VST2 plugins directly in SampleRobot Pro with the Instrument Host found in the Extras menu. The second connection is optional but recommended: Midi. If your instrument that you would like to sample allows for Midi control just connect the Midi output of your audio interface to the Midi input to your instrument and make sure that the Midi channel is set to one (or to omni mode).
The first thing that you should do in SampleRobot is assigning a global Audio Out Device in the upper left corner of the graphical user interface. This output will be used for sample playback (shortcut: space bar).
As you can see there are three smaller windows on left side called Projects, Multi-Samples and Samples. This is the hierarchy SampleRobot uses for organizing your sampling sessions. A project contains one or several multi-samples which each can hold up to 127 samples assigned to specific keys on the Virtual Keyboard in the lower part of the user interface.
A project holds a sound, e.g. a piano. A multi-sample is one articulation of that sound, say the "pianissimo' expression. Another multi-sample in that project could hold the 'mezzo-piano', again another the 'forte' etc. Those multi-samples have a specific Midi attack velocity assigned to them and can be later exported to allow for dynamic playing via a keyboard.
Now you can test your configuration (Midi and audio). Create a new project with the '+' button of the project window and give it a name. If desired you can rename it by double-clicking on the name in the list afterwards. Click on the '+' button of the multi-sample window to create a new multi-sample layer inside of that project and give it a name. On the right side you see the I/O tab now which is already selected. Choose your Audio In Device, the Left and Right Channel (inputs), the Audio Format and the Midi Out Device, Channel and Program. Directly above the virtual keyboad there are special buttons for selecting keys. Just click on '61' and 'Step'. That will set the sampling range for 61 keys and select each 6th key for sampling. You can customize this to your needs (see below). Now when you click onto the keys of the virtual keyboard your connected 'sampling source', your Midi instrument should create a sound. If not, your Midi connection is not working properly or your channel/program settings are not correct. If you see the red Peak Meter moving in the upper right section while clicking onto the virtual keys, your Midi and audio connections work perfectly and you're all set to record your first project with SampleRobot.
Please note that the graphical user interface is modular and you can customize it to your needs. You can grab e.g. the projects window (clicking and holding the headline) and drag it to another place on your desktop or to a secondary screen. In the lower right corner you can resize most windows. Just drag a window back to its original space on the main screen and it will snap back in again.
As you can see the center part of the user interface, called WaveRobot, is used for displaying waveforms of recorded samples as soon as you select a sample from the list.
It's important to know that the window right next to WaveRobot is context-sensitive. The color of the headline refers to the color of the section it belongs to. Yellow is project settings, orange refers to the selected multi-sample and green is sample settings. Just click on the entries in the different left-side windows (projects, multi-samples. samples) of the VP Airy Drone startup project. You will see that the settings window will change on the right side accordingly with the dedicated color letting you know which section you are in at the moment.
After sampling it can be convenient to select the previous or next entry in the windows on the left side. Here are the shortcuts:
Project window: Shift + CMD + Cursor Up/Down
Multi-samples window: Option + CMD + Cursor Up/Down
Samples: CMD + Cursor Up/Down
The Project Wizard is an easy way of getting started but there are some limitations which can be avoided by manually setting up a project or by modifying a created project before sampling.
Here are some things you can do (but not directly with the wizard):
Select custom keys to be sampled
Different inputs or even audio interfaces for each multi-sample layer
Different Midi controllers assigned for each multi-sample (SampleRobot Pro only)
Custom velocity ranges for each multi-sample layer
Custom key-ranges for each sample
Custom global sampling key-zone
You can easily change which keys are sampled by changing the selection on the virtual keyboard. With a multi-sample selected from the list just CMD + click onto the dedicated keys to invert their selection status. Only selected keys will be sampled.
Talking about sampling there are basically two modes offered by SampleRobot. Fully-automatic recording (Midi) or Semi-automatic recording. If you don't have a Midi connection established you need to manually trigger your instrument to be sampled and record each note one after the other.
If you see the Auto box checked right next to the little red microphone recording symbol in the projects and multi-sample windows you are in fully-automatic recording mode. If you don't use Midi uncheck one of the boxes. The other one will be updated automatically.
Another thing that is important to know: You need to save and export your projects after the sampling process to use them properly. The temporary recorded samples (folder specified in the projects settings) will contain half a second of silence before the actual recordings. This silence is used for the background noise detection in SampleRobot allowing for proper transient recognition.
And here is one last tip not only for starters: Don't edit the temporary wave files recorded by SampleRobot. Project data is saved independently from sample data. So loop and other references will be affected/lost when you externally edit the samples from a project directory.
We hope this helps getting started. If you have further questions please feel free to reach out to our support at any time.