Magix Samplitude 10 Review

March 24th, 2010 | Author: admin

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Make Own Music With Magix Samplitude 10

The Complete Suite
The philosophy behind these last two major additions would seem obviously to be to make Samplitude 10 as self-contained as possible, encompassing all processes from initial recording or programming to final mastering. Although plug-in automation has been available for quite a while in Samplitude, it only applied to third-party plug-ins. In this new version, automation capability has been added to Samplitude’s own suite of high-quality processors, pretty much making the use of any but the very best offerings from other manufacturers quite unnecessary. The other addition, the forbiddingly complex Am-munition dynamics plug-in, has clearly been designed as a programme compressor/limiter, not fundamentally a track-level processor.
However, a couple of considerations made me pause to wonder what the Magix party line really is. Another notable offering among the new releases, placed second in the roll-call in the Samplitude manual, is a new Cleaning & Restoration Suite, which includes a De-clicker/De-crackler, a De-clipper, a De-noiser with Noise Print Wizard, and a Brilliance Enhancer to help “compensate for losses incurred during MP3 coding”, all available as real-time effects. This is a desirable set of tools for work encountered by many mastering engineers, so you’d assume it would be included in the top-of-the-range Samplitude Pro. But it isn’t — versions of the De-clipper and De-noiser are, but only off-line, and without the Wizard.
Although the new tools are available as standard in the £2000 Sequoia and in the £200 Samplitude Master, they are not available in the Pro version of Samplitude itself, except as an add-on for 99 Euros, and only direct from Magix. So what is Samplitude Master? It’s a two-track version of Samplitude, cut to the bone, apparently to deal with finished mixes, and so doing without any MIDI tweaks, audio quantisation, optimised workflows and other such functions. At roughly a third of the price of the Pro version, and yet including the Cleaning & Restoration Suite, Samplitude Master would seem to be the way to go for mastering specialists who don’t need MIDI or mixing capability — hence the name, or so you’d think. Except that one of the important deletions from Samplitude Master is the set of Magix plug-ins — including the brand-new, mastering-inclined Am-munition.
Maybe I’m being a bit dim here, but this arrangement seems to be the worst of both worlds. For mastering purposes only, there are certainly ways in which the Samplitude Pro feature set could be drastically pruned to cut costs, but the Magix plug-ins are so useful and of such a high quality you’d really want to keep those on board. Yet if you spring the extra £400 for the Pro version, to get them, you’ll find the Cleaning & Restoration Suite missing. Here’s my advice to Magix: don’t mix us all up. If the Cleaning Suite is ‘Pro’ quality, include it in Samplitude Pro as standard.

New Features Round-up

As well as the automation, Am-munition and a new ‘Universal HQ’ resampling time-stretching/pitch-shifting algorithm (see box below), other notable improvements include new range-handling capabilities, side-chain routing for all VST and Magix plug-ins with more than two inputs, the Independence LE sample workstation (with a 4GB sound library), better mapping for hardware controllers, and a complete, successful makeover of the control-bar skins and general appearance.
Another new, and potentially extremely useful, addition is the ‘Overview mode’, which adds a representation of the entire project in a separate window below the main VIP window. Non-linear navigation through the VIP by lassoing sections of the overview or clicking in it is now very quick and easy, and can be much more speedy and accurate than (linear) scrolling. Samplitude’s particular way of implementing the overview function is very similar, for example, to the ‘navigation pane’ of SADiE, and does not offer visual cues to tell you exactly where you are, but hovering the mouse cursor over a section of the overview will bring up the object (clip) name and start time as a further aid to accurate navigation. The only slight grumble I have is the time it takes for Samplitude to actually display the location information: I only want my cursor to have to hover for a moment, not be kept in a holding pattern for whole seconds. I’m sure this is easily fixed: it’s not as if that action is competing with any other and needs any real computational decisions.
One feature that has slightly changed content but, happily, not its irrationality is the gloriously random (and slightly bonkers) index at the back of the manual. No mention will be found there of Am-munition dynamics processing, Cleaning & Restoration Suite (hint: look under ‘New’), Resampling HQ algorithms, or other such useful items. Instead, under ‘A’ we find “Access to the Internet must be permitted”; under ‘H’, “How it works” (“it” turns out to be aux bussing); under ‘I’, “Information regarding Samplitude network installation”. My favourites are under ‘T’, which covers both “The difference between loading and importing audio files” and “There is no permanent memory on the standard CodeMeter stick”. There are also, incidentally, 14 individual entries for ROBOTA, all referring to the same four pages. But this isn’t really a complaint; such quirkiness now feels like part of Samplitude’s individual charm (like the ketchup bottle on the SADiE toolbar for ‘write back to source file’).

Automation

The most powerful new feature in Samplitude 10 is the advanced automation that is now available at track, object and master level. At track level — the most comprehensive of the options — you can automate the volume, the pan, aux sends, track EQ, and all of the parameters of the excellent suite of Magix plug-ins that have been provided as standard since Samplitude 9 (see Sam Inglis’s review in SOS January 2007). Track volume and pan automation is pretty common in most digital audio workstations these days — how could we create a mix of even moderate complexity without it? — but the new availability of full and efficient automation for the normal channel-strip and other Magix plug-ins opens up a whole host of creative and corrective possibilities.
In the early days of multitrack recordings, mixes were generally fairly ‘static’: the main advantage of mixing was felt to reside simply in making post-recording balance choices possible, so once a mix was agreed it stayed pretty much the same throughout the song. But then more dynamic mixing techniques were developed and ‘flying fader’ automation was invented to ease the task, and eventually upped the creative ante — for those who could afford it. I have fond memories (well, memories) of working with non-automated mixing desks in situations where I had to write out and rehearse fader moves, with every member of the band being given responsibility for various mix parameters (though never the level fader of their own instrument!) for live dynamic mixdowns. Of course, with no automation, there was no recall either, so an error in any single pass required a completely new attempt. Within such constraints, the creative element of dynamic mixing was severely limited (although, of course, it didn’t feel like it at the time): fading sources in or out, up or down, and rough manipulation of aux send levels was just about the best that could be hoped for. So when automation became more widely available, creative juices began to run more freely. This is the kind of place where art and technology sit so well together: when what is initially developed as an added convenience eventually becomes a creative tool in its own right.
The reason I’m labouring this point a little is because until you have tried working with this level of automation you may not know just how creatively interesting mixing can be. Of course, such a level has been available for a long while, for those with the budgets to cover it, and even in some lower-budget DAWs, but the particular combination of well thought-out automation and the high-quality plug-ins in Samplitude seems to me to provide a whole new level of creativity for the cash.

Conclusion

What is beginning to push Samplitude ahead of the large, unruly pack of DAWs that now offer complete in-the-box solutions for recording, mixing and mastering engineers is the usable quality of what actually comes in their boxes. Magix’s decision to automate their plug-ins, and then add the excellent Am-munition to their roster, makes a strong case for Samplitude being quite the best DAW of its class. My grump about the non-inclusion of the new Cleaning & Restoration Suite in Samplitude Pro is only because that one odd omission seems to break the promise of being able to buy a single software package that, in the right hands, can do everything required. In absolute terms, of course, the individual elements have competition from the very highest-quality stand-alone developments (both hardware and software), against which they do not compare, but even if you have the budget to employ those tools, I’d still suggest you buy Samplitude for the basics of capture and mix control and then move further with the extra money. For the rest of us, given that those basics now come in at such a high quality, we can buy Samplitude for nearly everything else as well and be amazed at the money we’ve saved.