Sample Lab Review - Reviews - Music Tech Magazine

A great audio editor and sequencer featuring real-time audio mixdowns.

Price: £4.99
Manufacturer: Fotoh LLC
Website: http://www.samplelabapp.com

Fotoch LLC SampleLab

This app caught our eye at the NAMM Show due to its slick yet simple layout dedicated to sample sequencing. It has eight stereo channels that can load one sample each from – the included library, external recordings or imported files via iTunes. An editor located at the top of the screen uses imported or recorded sounds which you can then drag as a whole or as highlighted snippets to any channels.

The included library samples are loaded directly into the channels via a slightly cumbersome roll menu. On the positive side, the app comes with a lot of musical and drum-based samples. The downside is that these are all on a single roll menu that takes a long time to navigate. What’s more, there isn’t a preview option, so you have to re-load to hear each sound, even if browsing the library. The audio editor also includes trim and normalize as well as copy/ paste functions, which allows the app to function as a standalone audio editor to move audio to and from.

The editor itself is very well designed, using pinch zoom gestures for easy editing up-close.

The pattern sequencer is 16 steps and you can have up to ten sequences to then manually cue or set up into a loop. Each step entry can have individual settings for volume and pitch while playback length is preserved. When this is a feature we usually prefer it as an alternative to normal vari-speed re-pitching to samples. The reason for this is the sound quality can seriously suffer if the algorithms for this process aren’t great and in this instance it really shows if you go for larger pitch changes (especially on drum parts), whereas it wouldn’t sound as bad using normal pitch-changing approaches.

Four global FX are available for processing the master output in real time using X/Y controllers for each. Compression, bitcrusher, low-pass filtering and phase can all be multi- touched at once, which could be an excellent feature as this app also allows real-time recording to a mixdown file. The sound quality of the effects is fairly lo-fi, so although this is a great feature, in use this app works best as a sample sequencer. Using it in this way and editing sounds from the mic is a great way to pass the time… MTM

6/10 Verdict - A great audio editor and sequencer featuring real-time audio mixdowns. However, re-pitching and effects are quite crude-sounding.

Score: 6/10

This review first appeared in Music Tech Magazine issue 96
Filed under Audio Interfaces, Mini Reviews, Reviews

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Fotoh LLC Sample Lab Review

6/10 Verdict - A great audio editor and sequencer featuring real-time audio mixdowns. However, re-pitching and effects are quite crude-sounding.

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