Soundplant is a quite unique application that can be defined in multiple ways. Whether you call it a “digital audio performance program”, a computer keyboard sound triggering utility, or even an alternative to the nowadays-ubiquitous Launchpad-like hardware controllers, Soundplant is clearly surprising. It is capable of turning your simple, average keyboard into a versatile, low latency, multitrack sample-triggering device, or in other words, into a playable musical instrument which can be used to create live, unique music in a rather easy manner. Anyway, Soundplant can be also used for less creative purposes as well, like for quickly triggering specific sounds and audio effects during a presentation or a live show.
Soundplant lets you create custom keymaps, by assigning any note or sound that you like to any key, or load existing keymaps and create new music using the sounds and notes of those keymaps. A few sample keymaps can be downloaded from the official website of Soundplant for free. That's what I did too, as assigning sounds to keys and creating new keymaps was a bit confusing to me, but I admit I'm also rather inexperienced when it comes to this kind of programs.
I also like a lot about Soundplant the fact that it comes as a standalone program, of decent size, that can be easily installed on any system, and not as a VST plugin or other form of software that involves additional requirements.
Another remarkable feature of Soundplant is the fact that it can play a huge amount of multimedia file formats. There's also a direct internal recording function that lets you capture, record, and save the Soundplant's playback output. Many more other features are also available; in fact it will take many pages just to quickly list them all.
To sum it all up, Soundplant is a truly impressive tool that leaves no room for disappointment.
v42.1 [Nov 8, 2014]
- 32-bit floating point internal sound mixing adjustable to up to 96 kHz for highest possible sound output quality, making this the best sounding Soundplant ever.
- 256 sounds can be played simultaneously, with up to 12 channels of playback progress displayed in detailed view mode.
- Sound output device selection.
- Reverb, lowpass, resonance, and lfo realtime effects.
- Direct internal recording of Soundplant's output.
- Completely overhauled sound mixing engine now uses the great and lightweight FluidSynth, a solid and battle-tested open source sound engine enabling many of the above improvements.
- 'Hold down' mode allows precise control over key releases.
- Redesigned interface with more room for sound names, an enlarged waveform display, and vector graphics for better window stretching.
- Key labels text size setting.
- Customizable key label text.
- 'Buffer size', 'interface refresh rate', and 'key glow animation' settings for performance tuning.
- 'Background key input startup state' setting.
- 'Foreground window on sound trigger' setting.
- Added an 'only on sound trigger' option to the 'select key on key press' setting.
- Added a 'locate file…' option to the alert that appears when loading a keymap and the sound file can't be found in its original location, and improved. automatic searching for sound files when loading keymaps.
- 'Reload sound from disk' button.
- Improved master volume control offering up to 200% processed amplification.
- Finer individual key pan and volume control and better, smoother fades.
- Smoother realtime pitch shift.
- Onscreen keyboard layout changed to match the now more common layout with smaller return key and backslash on the row above it.
- RAM or disk loading option for each key no longer available, this is now handled automatically to take advantage of modern system capabilities with more RAM.
- Fade in and out times can be set to 0 to more easily have a key that only fades in or only fades out.
- 64-bit optimizations have been included for systems which support it, speeding up sound loading especially for compressed sounds.
- Improved support for surround sound files containing greater than 2 channels (Soundplant can now play them, but only as mixed down to 2 channels).
- Increased the 'recent keymaps' dropdown list size to 25 keymaps.
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