Get with the programmers
The Head of Software Design for the Swedish company’s XO drum machine tells us all about it
“I find the export features really powerful and unique”
Give us a quick history of XLN Audio. SO “Founders Niklas Möller and Lars Erlandsson wanted realistic and good sounding drums: quick, easy and in-the-box. Addictive Drums was released in December 2006. Today, the product portfolio consists of Addictive Keys and RC-20 Retro Color, plus tons of expansion products for Addictive Drums. The latest addition is the brand new drum sampler, XO.”
XO’s sample ‘constellation’ makes it very different from any other drum machine plugin we’ve ever seen. Can you explain the concept and inspiration?
SO “Addictive Drums fulfils the need for acoustic-sounding drums, but we’ve also always had the idea of creating a drum sampler focused on beats and one-shots, without diving into filenames and folders. This is where the ‘XO Space’ comes in. Five years ago, we built a prototype where you could browse samples in a space based on frequency and length. Then we stumbled upon Google’s The Infinite Drum Machine, which led us to grouping samples by similarity instead. That made the experience feel magical.”
How does XO’s grouping of similar samples work? Is machine learning involved at all?
SO “Yes, we use a pretty well-known technique called t-SNE (t-Distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding). It’s a way to reduce the number of dimensions in high-dimensional datasets, such as one-shot drum samples. t-SNE achieves a good distribution and similarity clustering, but it is slow and needs to be recalculated each time you add new samples, so we trained a neural network to mimic the behaviour of t-SNE. The hard part is to tweak and process the data before you feed it into the analysis, so that the distribution and clustering are based on relevant information.”
What else sets XO apart from other drum plugins? What elements of it are you most proud of?
SO “I believe it’s the ‘sum of it all’ that sets XO apart. From intricate details like loudness-compensated sample playback with automatic trim and exclusion of loops, to the amazing included sounds and presets. We’re proud that users seem to have so much fun with XO. We hear stories about users spending hours fiddling away, exploring new sounds and beats. Personally, I find the Live Filter (in the Sample Combiner) really unique and fun. It allows the search filters to be applied to your current sample selection – live! Type ‘909’ and you’ll get the current kit replaced by 909-sounding samples instead. I also find the export features really powerful and unique: drag out individual samples or the whole beat, either as WAV or MIDI.” Where did the name XO come from? SO “Coming up with a name for this product was really hard! It’s like coming up with a name for a band. We probably had hundreds of suggestions, but none of them felt right. Then the word ‘exo’ came to us, which is Greek for ‘outside’. Exo became XO, as we immediately saw the possibilities with the O becoming the ring that marks a selected sound in the XO Space. It just clicked!”