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The little switch alongside the combi socket lets you feed it with phantom power for using condenser mics, and also lets you switch it to a higher impedance, so that you can plug in electric guitars without quality loss. If you're short of a mic when inspiration strikes, there's a little one built into the top panel as well. Rear-panel phono connectors will accept stereo line-level inputs, while mics and instruments make use of a top-panel combi jack/XLR connector. There are lots of ways to get sound into the SP555 for sampling.

And what does the Reverse button do, I wonder? Answers on a postcard. When Loop is engaged, hitting the pad alternately triggers and switches off the sample, whereas repeated presses would normally just retrigger the sample, cutting off the previous playback without any overlap. You can't set independent loop points for the samples, so the Loop button just lets you smoothly repeat the whole sample indefinitely - fine for things like drum loops. Lighting the Gate button, however, causes playback to last only as long as the pad is held. Samples normally trigger as one-shots, playing all the way through when a pad is hit, irrespective of when you let go.
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On the plus side, though, this approach does make dealing with simple loop samples very fast and simple. Secondly, samples are automatically assigned an 'original tempo' value based on their length (not always the most reliable guide), and you can't edit this assigned value except to halve or double it. Firstly, the master tempo can only be set to exact bpm-value numbers and, although the range of available tempos covers 40-200bpm, there are only 26 options outside the 60-160bpm zone. The accuracy of the beat-matching is made a little rough and ready, though, by a couple of tempo-resolution limitations inherent in the SP555's operating system. The file's playback start and end points, overall level and tempo can all be quickly adjusted, the last using a pretty respectable real-time beat-matching algorithm that offers pitch-locked stretching over a range of 50-130 percent. However, the unit's Loop Capture facility (of which more in a moment) allows you to work around this restriction and effectively resample even with all 12 voices going at once.Įach sample has a few editable parameters, which can be reached via dedicated buttons.
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Given that you can have up to 160 stereo samples at your fingertips, the 12-voice polyphony isn't exactly lavish, and the manual informs me that this cuts down to a miserly four voices when you're using the built-in resampling. Apparently this grittiness is intented to simulate the sound of early digital devices, but there's no control over the Lo-fi data-reduction algorithm's parameters and, frankly, it just seemed to make everything I put through it sound broken! What doesn't sound much good, though, is the Lo-fi sampling mode, which only takes up half the storage space but sounds really gritty. Samples are data-compressed to make better use of the available storage space and, although I'm not a tremendous fan of data compression, the 2:1 compression routine used here sounds pretty good. The internal memory can hold 11 mono minutes at a 44.1kHz sampling rate, and given that you can get 48 minutes on a 128MB Compact Flash card, I presume this must mean there's about 32MB in there. Cards of up to 2GB capacity can be used, but no card is shipped with the machine as standard. Switching between 10 pad banks multiplies the number of samples that can be accessed to 160, with 32 stored in internal memory and the rest carried on an optional Compact Flash card plugged into a slot on the front edge of the machine. Each of the 16 large, numbered, velocity-sensitive pads plays a single mono or stereo sample.
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The SP555's primary sound generator is its sampler, which is controlled from a matrix of buttons at the right-hand side of the front panel. Despite jettisoning the family zero, the new SP555 otherwise follows very much in the footsteps of its forebears, providing the usual sampling, effects and sequencing functions, as well as chucking in a few nice little extras such as an infra-red D-Beam controlled synth/filter and a nifty on-the-fly Loop Capture facility. The world is not short of sampling sequencers at the moment, so what does the Roland SP555 have to make it worthy of your attention?Įver since the SP202, the Roland/Boss SP range of workstations have been increasing the fun-factor of sampling by combining it with madcap effects, real-time controls, friendly pattern-sequencing and (not least) loads of pretty flashing lights.
