Samplecell

[Grey]

Is a Samplecell card worth picking up??

what would this give in a 24Mix system?

or would a a cheap Akai sampler be more of an advantage?

[John_Toolbox]

If you get the ones with the TDM Module, the 8 outputs are added directly into pro tools, so you don't need any i/o like you would with an external sampler. You can put as many of these in your system as you have nodes on your tdm ribbon cable. At one point I had 7 of them in a 13 slot chassis with a mix3 and 10 node cable.

The other thing I liked about them was you can save and recall all of your banks and settings right with your pro tools session. They are also very low latency because they're on the tdm bus, great for tracking midi and monitoring it with your samples. It's the only sampler I've ever used with a keyboard player where they never complained about the delay in their headphones.

Biggest drawback is they are Os9 only, though there's not much of an advantage to running OSX with a mix system other than a few newer plugins.

[Mark Ziebarth]

I loved my Samplecell in OS 9 times. A straightforward combination of hard- and software. It has 32 MByte RAM, 32 voices and eight outputs (analog or via TDM). Later Digidesign offered a SoftSamplecell which was software only.

Originally Posted by Grey

Is a Samplecell card worth picking up??

Mine is available including TDM option...

Kind regards

Mark

[Jamshied]

Yes, I loved mine as well, and Soft SampleCell when it replaced the card. Like the others said; integrated, low-latency, saved with sessions, reliable. No frills; just sample playback, a relatively transparent part of Pro Tools. And yes, use OS9.

It should be cheap - I sold mine seven years ago for $200. Should be less now.

[Grey]

thanks john_toolbox

just picked one up from you,
look forward to this

Do you recommened the editors or Soft Samplecell?

[John_Toolbox]

Soft Samplecell will require a floppy or ilok authorization to run. It will allow you to load samples in your computer's ram(up to 1GB), but it only allows the use of 16 midi channels. To me, the best use for it is if you have a single instrument like a piano that uses a lot of large samples. Soft samplecell inputs also come in as an RTAS plugin(directconnect). This can create a problem with TDM systems because the RTAS ins will need to be on an audio track, which uses one voice. To actually record the input as audio, you'll need to bus that track to another track, which then uses 2 voices. Soft samplecell was really made more for the LE crowd in my opinion.

The Samplecell editor 3.1 software is free to use as long as you have a card in your system. Each samplecell card you add gives you 16 midi channels, so if you use bigger templates with lots of instruments the cards tend to be a better investment. The cards also have better latency than soft samplecell, and most of the libraries that were released for samplecell are pre-programmed in banks that fit on a full 32MB card(Some orchestral banks are made to be spread out of 2 or more cards).

BTW, here's the page with all of the downloads you'll need. Don't forget to put the samplecell tdm plugin in your plugins folder:

http://archive.digidesign.com/download/legacy/sc2mac/

[Grey]

What is the best card order?

1-Mix Core (first obviously)
1-Mix Farm
1-DSP Farm
1-Samplecell

[John_Toolbox]

Yes that's the recommended order, samplecells are always last.