I've had an MPC Live for about 6 years or so now, loved it until Akai decided they wanted to stop fixing bugs and just release more and more gimmicky plugins.

Groove Agent is about the closest I've come to it. I'm sure there's others, but as a Cubase user, the 'SE' version of Groove Agent that comes with it, is pretty much the MPC inside heh. Chopping a break, 'warping audio', everything is pretty much exactly the same.I jumped right into it in like 2 seconds and was up and running with it. That plugin is what made me decide to just go back in the box when I realized it did everything the MPC did, and was a lot quicker and complete.

 

Funny, only yesterday i spent several hours working out a killer workflow for this.

I produce in Ableton but it's so bad for navigating and editing audio that i decided to find another way.

All i'm trying to do is rip drum samples from complete songs, so my workflow is aimed towards that.

The good news is it's (almost) free!

I use 3 plugins:

Vice 2 (demo)
Melda's MRecorder - free
Blue Cat - Patchwork (not free, optional)

Vice 2 has got a really nice interface for slicing up and navigating complete songs.
The demo works for 60 minutes before shutting down.
It won't work on its own because as a demo limitation, they mangle the exported samples.

So after Vice, i put Melda's MRecorder. You can set it to only record on signal, so the sample it creates is sample-accurate the same (at the beginning) as the slice in Vice (so no editing required).

Once i find a sample i like, i hit record on MRecorder, click on the slice in Vice to play it, and MRecorder records it with a default name to a default folder. You can now rename it and drag it to your drum rack or sampler or whatever.

Optionally, you can host both plugins inside Patchwork. The advantage of this is that when you open the Patchwork interface, it will automatically open both the Vice and MRecorder interfaces in the same places as they were before.

So i have a Patchwork preset that i can drag onto a track and the 3 interfaces spring open, ready to sample. The Patchwork interface can be made really small.

Vice 2 obviously won't remember its settings or samples on save (demo) and an hour is normally enough to get what you need. MRecorder's default sample location can de saved in the default preset by going to "settings".

Initial Slice also looks cool, but you can't load MP3s (Vice can).

Hope this helps and have fun with it!

 

Last edited: Dec 4, 2024

Amazing Tip mate, thank you !

 

Welcome!

 

Apisonic Speedrum 2.
Just the other day found out that Speedrum 2 has a very decent slicer.
TAL Drum would have a slicer as well, but it's not as snappy as the one from Speedrum.
You can drag and drop the .wav (even .mp3, but who wants that) from explorer, it starts slicing, you can move the boundaries and then drag and drop the region to the pads.
Very intuitive.

 

Not being snappy is a good thing, old samplers were not very precise, we are today spoiled by graphical over-presentation of the wavetables.
We should return to slicing by ear

 

i've been trying Serato Sampler for the last few days, and although i hate the interface, i have to say it's time stretching and pitching shifting sound really great.

For ultimate sound mangling, i think a combination of Serato for high quality timestetch and Steinberg Backbone for freaking the sounds is great.

Really good time stretching is something that not many samplers do.

 

TAL-Sampler or Redux (The little VST brother of ReNoise)