Recording Forum

[cavemanic]

does any body know how to access those FTP samples anymore...they have a login and user name that comes up now....
anybody help?

[spinman]

Wish I did. Man it was sweet when it was open to the public.

[greendoor]

The Akai samples aren't bad, I grabbed the lot when I could. There are better sample CD's though. If you want a bunch of useful free drum samples, these are good: http://samples.artistcollaboration.com/

The Akai samples are mainly stereo, with real ambiance that can be a bit dodgy at times (flutter echo etc). Worth trying - get a great reverb plugin (like SIR with high-end reverb impulses) and process the above freebies. With tuning, eq, compression, and reverb you can create endless different samples that will sound as good, if not better, than the Akai ones.

[cavemanic]

They were free to access awhile ago..then you needed a pass word , then they became free, now password again :mad:

hopefully its a pattern .....
I have those other samples , i do like them alot.
the akai has heps of great cymbals samples thou that i want to get...how would you get a password etc for the site? would you have to buy one of there certain products?

[greendoor]

Why not schmooze an Akai dealer? They may not be overly precious about the password. I've seen the same Akai library on CD - a dealer might have a copy. But for $100 there a much better drum CD's now - some are 24 bit.

[spinman]

Thanks for the link; I'll check those out.
As for the akai samples, the ambience is part of the appeal for me. I get tired of artificial ambience on things, even SIR. I don't have a convenient way to use SIR since Sonar doesn't want to compensate for latency.

I also like the way the akai samples are organized: they tell you what drum it came from, and they give you multiple samples of one drum, so you can engineer a little variety into the part. If there's one thing I don't like its the exact same crash sample on every crash in a song!

Anyway, I try to get every decent drum sample I can find. The problem with all the sample CD's I've bought is that they usually have 1 kit playing a variety of beats. If you don't like the sound of the kit, you're screwed. Or they have a few drums processed in a bunch of different ways: as if I couldn't process them myself!

Anyway, I'm not into buying a drum sample CD now because most of the stuff I do for money is technoish stuff, for which I can find plenty of drum sounds either free on the net or from my synths.

[greendoor]

A good source of drum waves is from software sampler instrument kits. A lot of formats (Halion, EXS24,Battery etc) include a folder of waves or aiffs. So they are worth downloading, even if you don't own that app. If you get CDXtract you can grab the wave files from compiled formats such as soundfonts, kurzweil, akai, giga etc. The latency of SIR is irrelevant if you are processing and saving individual drum hits as stereo wave files. It's difficult to find reverbs that sound good on drums - they tend to be very expensive. SIR let's you use expensive reverb sounds for free, which is the only reason I suggest it for processing drum samples.