How do you deal with samples and MP3s that you want to use as raw material in Reaktor? Reaktor has an audio browser, but it doesn’t read compressed formats so they have to be converted beforehand. Then you’ll probably want to break them down into chunks so you don’t have to import a three minute song to get a ten second drum break or koto sample – so you have to fire up a separate audio editor and cut things up ahead of time.
FL Studio is one of my go-to programs for this, especially for dealing with large numbers of samples. It has a great sample browser sidebar which previews-on-select your compressed or uncompressed audio, and the integrated FL version of the Edison wave editor makes it a snap to grab a selected area of a sample and drag it into a sampler channel or the playlist. This works for just about any audio file, including compressed formats like Ogg and MP3.
This is handy for prototyping things and trying out ideas, but the built in sampler channels are limited and I’d rather be dragging things into Reaktor. So can you drag a sample or a piece of a sample from Edison into Reaktor running as a plugin in FL Studio? Of course not – that would be too easy.
The next step for me was to try the standalone Edison sound editor and see if it can drag selections into standalone Reaktor’s sample map. Nope, that didn’t work either.
Finally, I loaded up Reaktor in Reaper, selected a sample from Reaper‘s media explorer (it’s very similar to a Windows file explorer window), and opened it in Edison. Magically, dragging a selected area from Edison into Reaktor worked now! Reaper is voodoo, kids. I don’t question it too much, I just use it and be thankful.
Sample Drag and Drop with Edison, Reaper and Reaktor from Peter Dines on Vimeo.
The media explorer tab, like the browser in FL, works with compressed or uncompressed audio and can preview on select. And of course Edison can deal with compressed or uncompressed audio, so these two plus Reaktor make a super sampling triumvirate powerhouse. Jeez, I should be writing ad copy. Anyways, go grab ’em, because the demo versions of both programs are non expiring and will allow you to do what I’ve demonstrated here.