XLN Life

As an advertising music composer, I have worked on several projects where the agency provided ideas to use sound from products as rhythms. This plugin would be incredibly useful for such projects, and I am very interested in it.

Okay. This is pretty cool.

Definitely interested but can’t really tell what it does due to the marketing and layers of hype on their website. Does it just incorporate the recording into pre-existing grooves or does the sample influence the whole structure? Very hard to tell. I will demo.

It looks like it does transient detection of any audio and then uses that to construct tonal and non-tonal rhythmic beats/music.

This does look like it simplifies a process that is used a lot in modern music and for composition could add some really different/unique sounds without as much heavy lifting to create them.

The only part I wasn't sure about is the processing of those sounds with the app. Often the "found sounds" used are often heavily processed and I couldn't tell if you could do that in this app. Plus I don't think you can layer sounds either, which is often quite common to do.

The image below shows some ability to manipulate, but looks limited in how you can transform the sounds.

I've been playing with the (excellent) app Koala for a few days, and this reminds me of Koala, but more bloated and less immediate. And 20x the price. There is probably a good idea in here, it just needs some refining.

Richard Wilkinson said:

I've been playing with the (excellent) app Koala for a few days, and this reminds me of Koala, but more bloated and less immediate. And 20x the price. There is probably a good idea in here, it just needs some refining.

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Is this the Koala Sampler or something else?

As this is something I have never got around to buying even though I own some many iOS music apps.

I love the concept and will give it a whirl.

(It was weird hearing a British narrator with Received Pronunciation pronounce “route” the American way rather than as “root”.)

From what I have seen it automates exactly that phase in the process which for me is the fun part when slicing samples in Maschine.
In other words, I don't get it.

Sometimes I get the impression progress in our times is about elimination of the things that are actually fun to get results quicker. I don't very much care about a result I wasn't really involved in creating.

Markrs said:

Is this the Koala Sampler or something else?

Home » Koala Sampler

Koala Sampler is the ultimate pocket-sized sampler for making beats in seconds, for iOS and Android. Import or record samples, 24 built-in effects.

www.koalasampler.com

As this is something I have never got around to buying even though I own some many iOS music apps.

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This is the one. Won't derail the thread too much, but I was looking into the new Teenage Engineering thing and kept seeing people say 'Koala is so much better than this thing, and it's $5' - so I downloaded it, and I'm having a blast.

Downloaded the demo. In less than 30 seconds I had an original quirky beat. It's really well thought out and the mobile app recording just immediately sends it to your DAW or standalone and you're off!

It's good. It's fun...

very cool for cinematic rhythms. throw in any old loop and its a whole new thing. My only negative about it is that it doesn't let you mix and match slices with other wav imports. and XO didn't do it for me. If Life had a way to let the user select a couple of wave loops and with the power of "AI" (They sure slap this marketing gimmick everywhere lately) then it would be so cool.

gsilbers said:

If Life had a way to let the user select a couple of wave loops

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I thought that's what the DAW recorder was for?
I don't have much need to use my iPhone as a 'field recorder' as I have an actual field recorder & mics. It was the idea of loading up a bunch of existing material in my DAW and sending it into Life via the DAW recorder that interested me.

@muratkayi agree, sample digging is part of the fun.
I think for better or worse we will be seeing more & more of this kind of approach to music making. Especially the 'click RANDOM button, get new variations & keep clicking RANDOM until you get something you like' - its not the first to do that, by any means..

I often drop (non-musical) sounds into VICE which is an auto/slicing sampler (like Recycle) and it is very powerful, finding rhythms & elements from source material, while keeping the human in charge rather than AI.

Works quite well I gotta say

I am looking forward to checking out all the alternative apps and tips people have posted in this thread. Quite an interesting discussion!

Also @timprebble it is interesting you picked out the randomisation as a characteristic feature of this kind of tool, because it was exactly that part of the demo video which irked me, even though I haven't really understood why. It's not that I need full control over the process, but clicking until I like is a rather gruesome outlook for the creative process in my opinion.

I like it! A lot! The app really brings it home and it's immediately in the plugin after you've recorded it with your phone and ready to play with.

Biggest trepidation I have is that the rhythm patterns it generates will start sounding “samey” after a while. If so then not much value to using this vs any other tool that can chop your samples and then let you create a them via midi. Would love to hear from anyone who has been using it how varied the rhythm patterns it comes up with are. I’d use it for perc loops and topper loops personally, so variation is key.

My initial thought after watching a quick video was that Life takes the fun out the creative process. Then I downloaded the trial and thought it might not be a bad idea to have another option. Gonna try some of the sample libraries I have from Hiss and a Roar. That'll be a good place to start.

motomotomoto said:

Biggest trepidation I have is that the rhythm patterns it generates will start sounding “samey” after a while. If so then not much value to using this vs any other tool that can chop your samples and then let you create a them via midi. Would love to hear from anyone who has been using it how varied the rhythm patterns it comes up with are. I’d use it for perc loops and topper loops personally, so variation is key.

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I presume it's mostly been trained on 4/4 - be interesting to see what it does with non 4/4 time signatures...

It's very 4/4 from what I can tell.