réactions à la news Magix met à jour Samplitude Pro

From the very beginning, two hallmarks have defined the philosophy behind Samplitude: the 'object oriented' approach to editing and processing, and an obsessive commitment to purity of sound quality. With respect to the former, Tilman Herberger explains: "We were always convinced that it makes sense to have real-time effects on the smallest possible level. We did not like the idea of having to use a whole track simply to apply an EQ, so the idea was to have it for each clip independently of the next clip. All our other software tools share the same concept of non-destructive object-based editing. It is very common in the video area today, but not so common in the audio area — and we have it for both. It makes the project very clear, because you need only one track, but you can use 20 effects one after another. It is also very CPU-economic, because only the actual audible effects [at any one moment] have to be calculated, no matter what comes in five minutes or what was three minutes ago. It is very useful for guys who have to deal with hundreds or thousands of cuts, and this is the case, for example, in the classical music area.

"Being native helps a lot with doing these object-oriented effects. For a DSP card, it is much harder switching in real time without any glitches from one effect to another, but for a native processor this is much easier — I would not say simple, because this is the hard programming stuff, but being native was an advantage for that.”

Herberger is sceptical about the notion that there are no sonic differences between audio programs. "There was a test that was done a few years ago by a music conservatory, where they compared digital audio workstations — only the mixing [ie. summing] of the tracks — and then they made a really good blind listening test. In this category was also mixing via simply passive resistors, because everybody says 'This is the best way you can mix audio signals on an analogue level.' In this contest we won, together with one or two other digital audio workstations, on the same level with the analogue resistors, because this was the group where the listeners could not discern differences.

"I think the big thing about the sound quality is to make no mistakes. You must not do mistakes in the DSP. It's a big goal, and a lot of errors and not-clever routines are done by a lot of parties on the market, and people who are trained to hear audio will discover these immediately. Six or seven years ago, we had a patch for a new Samplitude version, and one day an American guy called us and said 'Hey, you did something wrong in your program. It sounds bad now.' We measured, and did tests, and after a long time we found out that in the 24th bit of the audio in going from floating-point arithmetic that we do internally down to the sample level through a 24-bit converter, we forgot the dithering. I personally could not hear this, to be honest — but you can measure it, and in a program as huge as Samplitude, you have a thousand points where you can make a mistake of this sort.”

"Especially with small waves in the area of the zero crossing,” adds Titus Tost. "As you switch from negative to positive, there are some problems with rounding. It takes a lot of experience to put this together so that it sounds good.”

The twin commitment to object-oriented editing and absolute 'correctness' of sound quality has been core to Samplitude's development, but Pro X sees some major changes in other areas, most notably the user interface. "We really worked a lot on the new user interface of the program, because we know all the deep features in the detail do not make much sense if people do not find them, or if working with the user interface is a hassle and makes no fun!” says Tilman Herberger. "I think this is a kind of modern user interface. This was the goal of the new user interface: to have a clear structure and everything that is active right now visible — if you want it, of course!”

It's clear that Herberger and Tost also see the acquisition and integration of the Independence sampler as filling an important gap in Samplitude's comprehensive feature set. "I think the most important new feature is the integration of the Yellow Tools instrument,” says Herberger, "because this gives you now a huge amount of perfect sampled instruments, which were missing in the old version. This is not a standard sample bank like everybody has — the guy who produced them really put his heart into them.”

Finally, as mentioned in the main text, Magix have already announced that after 18 years as a Windows application, Samplitude Pro X will soon be available for Mac OS X. This, apparently, has been the number one user request for many years now, but porting it is a huge task that requires considerable development resources. "It's a complex product developed over the last 18 years,” explains Titus Tost, "and it's not so easy to put all the stuff into a Mac version.”

"Fifteen years ago we were two guys, so it was not possible for us to make a Mac version,” continues Tilman Herberger, "but right now we have the company, we have the background, we have the access to the market to make sure it makes sense.”

"And we have also the Intel processors in the Mac!” adds Tost.

But although there is a firm commitment to its release, no date has yet been set. "We will not come to market with an unstable or not really finished version,” insists Herberger. "This is our policy always in the professional area. For the pros, the audio quality and stability are the most important features.”

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