SampleTank 4 MAX €600

The original SampleTank appeared around the turn of the century, and was one of the first software ROMplers to try and emulate pretty much every instrument out there. It was also one of IK’s first outings as well, so you see both what an important product it is in the history of computer music and for one of the key players within it.

As to whether there is room for this kind of ROMpler a couple of decades on, and the answer is ‘yes there clearly is’. These kinds of massive instrument libraries are more common than ever, whether they are focussed on the orchestral or fantastical, and the market seems to be expanding all the time with companies like Spitfire Audio releasing high-quality playable libraries, almost on a weekly basis.

Few companies do quite the spread of instruments like this, though. Version 4 of SampleTank – and that’s quite a ‘steady’ rise in version numbers, if you think about it – delivers a completely different experience to its groundbreaking ancestor. Where that was about playing sounds, 4 is more about composing and playing, with a Pattern Player (with 4,000 MIDI patterns), a Loop Manager (with 7,500 loops) an arpeggiator and Strummer.

What has not been lost, though, is the beautiful simplicity of the original. Stepping through sounds and setting up groups of them is as easy as ever, and there’s an overall slick feel to the whole experience that screams ‘two decades of development’.

That price might put you off, but remember that this is pretty much every ‘real’ instrument you could wish for (plus a ton of synths) over some quarter of a terabyte of data and 8,000 sounds. There are also a couple of versions beneath MAX – SampleTank LE (30GB of samples and 2,000 sounds for €179.99), and 4 (100GB of samples and 6,000 sounds for €359.99) – if the girth of Max is simply too much for you.

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