Design Your Own Computer Sounds For Free

Free samples have always been a popular retail marketing ploy, but Vember Audio are now taking that tactic into the software sound creation arena. Vember are the makers of such sonic manipulation engines as the Surge synthesiser and the Shortcircuit sampler, which have tended to cater to sound designers who want to create their own sounds from scratch rather than providing banks and banks of factory preset sounds. The good news is that the Shortcircuit sampler has now been released to the general public – for free!

This software is Shortcircuit 1.1.2, exactly the same version that was being sold for $139 last week. This free release of the package is intended to create some buzz around the release of Shortcircuit version 2 which is coming up soon. The beta of version 2 is currently available for free here as well. Why are the Swedes so good at making audio software?

Here are some of the specs:

User interface

* Streamlined user interface for fast editing at the sample-zone level.
* Fast editing of multiple zones.
* “In context”-sample preview.
* Extensive drag & drop support (onto the keyrange-view or the list-view).

Sample/Instrument import

* RIFF wave-files (.wav) (8/16/24/32-bit & 32-bit float, mono/stereo at any sample rate)
* AKAI S5000/S6000/Z4/Z8 .akp banks (partial)
* NI battery kits (partial)
* Soundfont 2.00 (partial)
* Propellerhead Recycle 1 & 2

Sampler engine

* High-quality sinc interpolation
* Oversampling used when needed to prevent aliasing
* Double-precision float math (64-bit) used where it matters (IIR-filters).
* Single-precision float math (32-bit) used elsewhere.
* Supports any sample-rate.
* Max polyphony per instance: 256 voices
* Multiple outputs. (max 16 mono AND 8 stereo-pairs per instance)