Samplerific

There’s probably a computer in every work environment, which makes it a pretty powerful multifunctional tool. This means it also comes in handy for audio mixing, which doesn’t necessarily have to involve complex software components. For instance, Samplerific is the type of application to use for effects in your live audio sessions.

On the bright side of things, the application doesn’t even take you through a setup process to enable functionality, which means you can have it stored on a thumb drive in case you need to use it on other computers than your own. Just make sure that the computer you use is fitted with .NET Framework, because it’s a mandatory component.

The visual design might not really strike you as appealing, but it proves intuitive enough once you get the hang of things. There are up to eight different slots at your disposal which can be fitted with custom audio effects. The list of items you use can be saved so you don’t have to create it every time.

However, you might find the process of creating the list a little frustrating, and this is mostly because of the lack of a browse dialog. This means you need to manually provide the exact path and filename of the WAV file you wish to add to a slot. Moreover, volume is handled generally for all slots, and it would have been useful to see individual sliders.

There’s the possibility to save the file, but only so it doesn’t get discarded on exit. Unfortunately, there’s no clear set of playback controls, in the sense that you can only start playback and stop everything. This means you might want to keep your effects short of length, just so you don’t risk stopping everything for a single effect.

Taking everything into consideration, we can state that Samplerific comes with good intentions, and aims to make live sessions more powerful through custom effects. However, the poor choice and management of playback controls leaves much to be desired overall.