What's the best (sound) sampling solution?

[Cyberus]

What's the best sampler solution for my A1200 or A500. I know you can get those GVP, Technosound Turbo etc parallel port samplers. Are they any good? What's the best one?

Cheers,
Cyberus

[xeron]

The highest quality sampler made for a basic "wedgie" Amiga was the Aura, which could sample in 12-bit, but required a PCMCIA slot (and another port on the back). I think it worked with both A600 or A1200.

If the delfina has inputs, that would be able to sample at higher rates and at 16bit.

For big box amigas, a lot of people rave about the quality of the Repulse card for this. (I have a repulse, but i'm no professional audio bod, however, samples from it do sound very good indeed to my untrained ears :-D ).

Anyway, check out the sound card and sampler pages at www.amiga-hardware.com.

[Blomberg]

The highest quality sampler made for a basic "wedgie" Amiga was the Aura, which could sample in 12-bit, but required a PCMCIA slot (and another port on the back). I think it worked with both A600 or A1200.

IIRC, there was also the Clarity, which was 16 bit, never used it myself, though. It had a MIDI interface too, IIRC.

I had the GVP DSS8 8bit parallel port thingy, which I won't recommend, unless you want low quality, crunchy sound (but hey, it was cheap).

I'd go for a complete sound card solution, if of course they have inputs at all, I can't say that I know much about Amiga-specific sound cards.
But even an SB 128 would be a better solution than the old 8bit samplers (but only if you have PCI slots, of course).

[Nightcrawler]

The Aura is actually very good. I use one pretty often on my A1200 for sampling things like drums, bass and percussion. (I use my 1200 more or less as a drum machine these days). Sampling in 16 bit, and converting to 8 bit for Paula playback works surprisingly well as long as the signal is clean when I sample it. It connects to the PCMCIA port, and has "through" connectors for Paula (standard RCA type).

I've actually gotten comments like "Is that a CD with drumtracks on it?" and "you did that with 8 bit sound? B*llsh*t!". And I enjoyed that...

The software isn't very good, and takes getting used to, but it works.

I would think that this is the easiest solution? I heard of another sampler a while back that connected to both the PCMCIA port and the parallel port which gave true 16 bit sound, but it wouldn't allow you to use anything else on the Parallel port. I think.

[ruffneck]

GVP DSS8+ is good 8bit sampler, if you are looking for fun/hobby stuff. Better than most other 8bit ones,  gives good results even with A500.
And looks nice too:)
For serious work with A1200 are Delfina1200 (has DSP for realtime effects and realtime mp3 decoding with stock A1200), Prelude1200 and Melody1200. All of them use A1200 clockport interface and have AHI support. If you have towerised A1200 you can even use DelfinaFlipper with clockport connector.