iPhone App Directory

The Basics: Sampling

Sampling applications are quite common on all platforms these days. Of course there are a wide variety of applications available but few will do all the things you want in one place.

First off there are lots of voice recording applications. There's nothing wrong with these apps, but of course they do very little in terms of sampling.

Palm OS
On the Palm side there are only a small number of actual audio editing applications. My favourite is Wave Edit Pro, and of course the enterprise edition of the same app.

Wave Edit Pro is an excellent recorder and editor. It offers no plug ins or effects, but is very good at cutting and pasting sample data directly on a Palm device. Also, it has one benefit over other applications in that you can paste sample data from one sample into another.

Aside from Wave Edit Pro the best application for sample editing and manipulation is Bhajis Loops. Of course there's plenty of information on this blog about Bhajis Loops and on the chocopoolp site too.

However, the notable information in terms of sample editing is that you can do almost anything using Bhajis loops when it come to samples.

Windows Mobile
In terms of windows mobile applications, again there are lots and lots of audio recorders available, but fewer sample editors. There is one application like Wave Edit Pro called Pocket Mixer, which I have never tried personally but looks really good.. There are of course lots of applications that work with sample data:

4Pockets make the awsome MeTeoR (Multi-Track Recorder) application, which is one of the best audio applications for PDAs anywhere. 4Pockets also make the AudioBox Micro Composer, which has an onboard sampler.

Griff too has a sampler, as does Syntrax, although Syntrax has really amazing sample manipulation features. Mixx Mobile is also worth a look at.

Other Platforms
Syntrax is available for Symbian devices as well as PocketPC, but aside from that I know very little

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

re Wave Edit Pro: I just bought the enterprise edition, but already have trouble getting larger wav files to load, getting an error message "error: unexpected end of file! couldn't read...". Why wouldn't it load or read? It played ok on my Mac. As a classical musician with a Treo 700p I hoped to be able to break up long performance recordings into smaller files for individual works or movements. What has your experience been with large files? If this doesn't work the only portable SD card based editing solution I can think of would be a Marantz 620 portable recorder with a copy segment feature.

ashley said...

I think that the app is limited to using the device's memory for loading samples, so if your sample is larger it won't fit in and work. That's my theory anyway. It would be best to contact the developer and ask if they can offer any assistance.

Anonymous said...

I've emailed the developer twice about this issue, so far have gotten no response. Has anybody else tried this program on a Treo 700p? I saw that Meteor requires 5 meg of open RAM on a Windows Mobile PDA, does it also use the SD card for temp files?

ashley said...

Hi Joshua, I'm not sure what you mean by temp files, but you certainly can use MeTeoR to bring in large files into a track. MeTeoR uses the SD card and not the device internal memory for working on you song / track / piece, so it is more flexible than something like Wave Edit Pro. It is worth trying it out first though.

I'm sorry to heat that you weren't able to get hold of the Wave Edit Pro developer. Hopefully they'll come back to you soon.

Anonymous said...

Needs an update I think