Sample player, that plays loops, accepts midi clock, won't go out of sync

The Lounge Other Gear
#21

If you have an iPad, you could use a couple of setups:

  1. I have an iPad Pro so I use a Type C hub (the edge clip on style) that let’s me connect a Roland UM-One USB to DIN MIDI adapter. This same hub has a mini jack on it that I use a mini TRS to 1/4" TS splitter for audio out.

  2. A camera connection kit to use the same Roland UM-One MIDI adapter and the native headphone out jack.

I’m sure there are a lot of solutions for playing back long samples on the iPad but the one I never thought of and that my friend uses on a super old iPad is Traktor Pro DJ. I’m not sure about the MIDI support for it though. I imagine it has some MIDI implementation as I believe it does work with controllers. It would host a ton of long samples for you and it supports queue points so you can setup long files with start points.

As for reliability? I’ve not had a ton of issues sending MIDI into the iPad. My biggest concern is the reliability of the attached hub. The Type C port doesn’t seem to seat all connectors firmly and it can, in some circumstances, lose its connection. An overcomeable problem but one to be mindful of.

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#22

Pioneer sp16 if you can find a cheap one ?

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#23

What about one of those electro harmonix loopers? They take midi clock in and you can store loops on them.
https://www.ehx.com/products/ehx-45000
https://www.ehx.com/products/ehx-95000

they are both about $500

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#24

It should be the ideal solution really shouldn’t it, but we have experienced strange midi issues using the ipad as well.
I’m using a midi mate and the apple cck and for something like fugue there’s no issue. Patterning drops out occasionally which is really frustrating as that’s a really cool app.

I had suggested the traktor ipad route, but I think the issue was as you’ve said the midi implementation. I may be wrong so it’s worth revisiting. I just remember there being a reason why it wouldn’t work.

#25

Yeah man, that would be a great solution. Even the shortcomings would be tolerable, if I could get one cheap enough.

Edit- man the prices on ebay are crazy. One is on for around 600 notes!

#26

OK that’s not even crossed my mind. Thank you. I will investigate.

#27

In the past I’ve used Looptastic HD in lieu of the Blackbox… but I’m not sure about its current status:

looptastichd
looptastichd1200×900 306 KB

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#28

I think the retail price came down though I bought one for £500 a while ago(as new condition) but I think that price is rare . I sold it and kept octatrack

They’re very capable ‘normal’ products, octatrack is a little more flexible … I’ll leave it there otherwise this thread will be one sp16 vs octatrack … and very boring very quickly.

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#29

No suggestions, but Launch Pad iOS would be so amazing with a Launch Pad if it only accepted MIDI in…it has literally been the unusable but obvious solution to so many live rigs I’ve tried to put to together that needed solid looping…

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#30

Okay, so, you’re looking for a sampler that will real-time time-stretch samples, not just “trigger” them and MIDI “sync” as you keep saying… Big difference there, and a much smaller list of options.

One of the modern MPCs perhaps?

Cheers!

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#31

Very cool. I shall take a look and see what the current stays is

#32

Ha! Yeah I get you-nobody has time for those arguments.

From what I have seen it does seem like a great loop player, but without, as you say, the flexibility of the OT.

#33

It’s madness, and waht makes it even more stinging, is that you have to pay for the privilege of midi out!

It really would be the simplest and best option for our scenario.

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#34

I thought about the live, but have read conflicting information about the amount of loops it can have loaded at any one time.

#35

I guess that depends on whether we’re talking audio tracks, clips, or samples…

You can only have eight audio tracks, if I recall correctly (I don’t generally use audio tracks, so I’ve not tested the boundaries there). Clips and samples, on the other hand, you can have as many as you’ve got the RAM for, and it’s a 32-sample polyphony max.

Cheers!

#36

No streaming on the Live, so whatever you do with it, you’re limited to RAM. It’s advertised as 2GB of RAM which seems decent, but you must take into account that it holds the OS and that the sample data is held as 32bit floats in RAM… so if your samples are on disk as 44.1khz/16bit you will probably hit the limit short after loading 700MB of them. This makes the 8 track recorder feature completely pointless IMO.

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#37

Excellent. Thank you for that information, as I’d read the ram size and thought it was a reasonable size.

#38

I don’t want to presume what the OP’s aesthetic is as an artist, but he did mention that he was interested in getting away from DJ’ing. It seems to me that the only reason to diverge from that, would be to lean more on the performance aspect of playing live. In the world of electronic music, I would suggest that the foundation of that entails breaking things down into smaller pieces, with the intention of manipulating said pieces manually. Otherwise, why not just stick with DJ’ing?

To that end, in my experience, there is more than enough memory in the MPC Live to accommodate a full-show’s worth of samples and clips. I often play as much as four hours of music in the span of a gig. But then, I’m a musician, and as such, I play the MPC like I would any instrument: i.e. live and in real time.

That said, if you’re looking to trigger long audio tracks or clips, as you would spinning full songs as a DJ, for sure you’ll run out of space quickly. Of course, you could always just load a new project, which only takes a couple seconds; but there seems to be a certain paranoia about that in the EDM community which I will never fully understand. I’ve personally never had a problem with taking a bow and observing a moment of silence… :wink:

Cheers!

#39

As for the Blackbox, it should sync fine but you wanna trigger your clips for launch some time before you want them to fire. Not on the beat, like an Elektron trig, but before. Clips are quantized to start at an interval you set, so for loop launching and similar, it should work. I’ve had no issues with sync when doing it like this.

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#40

I think he’s looking for real-time time-stretching though… Can the Blackbox do that?

Cheers!

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