With all the talk of samplers since TE decided to release the ridiculously hyped K.O. II, I decided to finally pick up Koala Sampler. I've heard many good things about it, and for good reason. It's amazing! It's so immediate and fun and actually stupid powerful if you shell out (~$15 for everything) for the mixer, effects, and time stretch extras.
I dusted off my ancient sample collection and plopped them on my phone (Galaxy S23 Ultra) and am putting finishing touches on 3 tracks in just a few days, and just hauling it out to play with my daughter who gets a kick out of it. I even found a new use for my Samson Go mic which works with Android and has a headphone jack. It's perfect since the S23 Ultra doesn't have a headphone jack (fuck you very much Apple, Google, and Samsung) and the Samson mic is obviously much better quality than the (actually not that bad) internal mic.
My phone battery hates me. Though I don't really notice Koala being any more demanding than anything else. I'm just using my phone so much more.
The base version is ~$5 and very much worth it to check out if phone sampling is for you. I really recommend at least the mixer upgrade. It really adds a lot of functionality for another $5. The time stretch stuff that comes with Samurai (the name of the other upgrade) is decent as well, though certainly not as necessary if you mostly use one-shots instead of loops.
I like Koala for how EASY PEASEY it is to resample. I like to just record my voice, mess with them in the effects to create the “instrument” I need, then hit resample. By 10/15 minutes I have a full set of sounds to make a banger with
Yup. They really made it super easy and intuitive to use. I'm always kind of left bewildered at how much I get done with it in such a short time. At least until I export my files to PC and see how much post-processing I need to do. :-P
I have it loaded on my iPad but have never taken the time to dive in. It was good to fully get my hands dirty editing samples and tweaking the sound to what I like and not just loading the .wav on a pad and calling it a day.
How are you managing loading samples back and forth from your main computer to your Koala app?