Useful software.
Made thoughtfully.

Sampler Food

Fill your sampler’s belly with tasty audio goodness — and get back to making music.

Sampler Food is for users of hardware samplers such as the 2HP Play Eurorack module, Bastl Instruments microGranny and Korg Volca — particularly the ones that can be a little fussy about what they consume.

Sometimes it isn’t enough to give your sampler a sound file. It wants a specific sample rate, bit depth and number of channels. Some devices even expect samples to follow a particular naming convention before they’ll recognise them.

Sampler Food takes care of that preparation for you.

You can also make quick-and-dirty chops without leaving the macOS app. Take a longer piece of audio and chop it up, or start with existing samples, prepare everything for your particular hardware, fill up the SD card and get back to creating.

Chop it up

The chopping feature takes some of its inspiration from tracker music and the resampled, tightly cut-up approach associated with artists such as Aphex Twin and Squarepusher.

Chops can be prepared for monophonic playback, where one sample cuts off the previous one rather than overlapping — opening up a very different way of playing and sequencing source material.

How you chop the audio is up to you. Slice up a rhythmic loop, or get more creative with your start and end points, playback direction and — when you need them — fades. Samples are automatically trimmed to help prevent clicks at the beginning and end.

The editing tools aren’t going to rock the world, but that isn’t really the point. They’re designed for quick, on-the-go sample prep — particularly for hardware with painfully slow built-in slicing, or no editing facilities at all.

And it doesn’t have to start with conventional samples.

Grab a field recording, chop and convert it, and quickly turn it into material your Eurorack sampler or little granular friend can digest — ready to become a drone, texture, rhythm or the starting point for an experimental DAWless jam.

Less time converting files. More time making noise.

RetroMedia

Modern Mac. Retro media.

RetroMedia is a utility for opening floppy disk and hard drive images, including those used by floppy and SCSI storage emulators.

The app is a by-product of some of my other projects and I’m sharing it in case it solves a problem for somebody else working with retro computers or musical instruments, modern storage solutions, and an Apple Silicon Mac.

It’s deliberately a straightforward tool: open and work with disk images on a modern Mac without making the process more complicated than it needs to be.

Ideas & feature requests. If you’re making use of RetroMedia and there’s an additional feature that would make your life easier, drop me a line at featurerequests@skootaman.uk. I’ll give it some consideration.

Found a bug? You can report it at support@skootaman.uk or raise an issue through GitHub.