For Musicians Editing Samples |

Samples are the basic building block of all Instrument sounds. While the Beatnik built-in Instrument banks contain a huge number of Samples, composition-specific sounds like speech, singing, sound effects, and featured musical sounds generally require custom Samples. To use custom Samples in an RMF file, you must import them into the Beatnik Editor Session file.
Often you'll find that the Samples you've imported need a little cleaning-up before they'll work well in Instruments. You can use the Beatnik Editor's built-in Sample Editor window for most such basic work - deleting unwanted parts, creating fade-ins and fade-outs, adjusting overall volume, and setting loop points for sustaining. However, if you need to do any more elaborate sample editing - for example, converting sample rates or turning stereo samples into mono - you'll need a separate, full-featured sample editor software package.
About Sample Sizes
Custom Samples can bring your projects a unique edge - but you should be aware that they can also greatly increase download times, which carries the risk of irritating your users on the Web. In the Sample Editor, the size of each Sample is shown as bytes used on disk in the info display at the bottom of the window.
See also: How Do I ...Make my Samples Smaller? Working with the Sample Editor
The Sample Editor window should feel pretty familiar if you've ever used any sample editing application before. The middle section of the window is a waveform editing display that you can zoom into - on both the time axis and the level axis - and scroll left and right. The loop point markers appear above the waveform, with a Loop on/off button and editable start and end number fields below. To edit the waveform, you make a selection by dragging across your desired range (or using the Select All command), and then use either the Volume Handles, the context menu, the Sample menu, or the Delete command (in the Edit menu). You can also set the playback sampling rate, and set the Root Key that the Beatnik Editor will use whenever you ask it to make a new Instrument using this Sample - automatically correcting for pitch in the Keymap it generates.
Sound Editing Controls
The context menu and the Sample menu contain both edit commands and view control commands, which are explained in the Window Reference section for the Sample Editor window:
The Volume Handles are a little different from any other sample editor you've seen. Whenever you make a selection, three Volume Handles appear across the top:
From left to right, these are the Fade-In Handle, the Fader Handle, and the Fade-Out Handle.
To create a fade-in: Click in the Fade-In Handle and drag to the right, releasing the mouse button where you want the fade-in to finish. To create a fade-out: Click in the Fade-Out Handle and drag to the left, releasing the mouse button where you want the fade-out to start. To adjust the level: Click in the Fader Handle and drag up or down to turn the level up or down. Note: Be sure to listen critically to your sample after boosting, since excessive volume boosts will cause digital distortion. To boost a selection to its maximum before distortion, use the Normalize command. Looping Tips
Creating a smooth loop can be the most challenging part of creating a custom musical instrument Sample. Here are a couple of tips:
Good loops need very similar timbre and pitch at the start and end of the looping region, otherwise the splice between end and beginning will sound jarring. The best loops are usually found some time after the sound's initial attack - specifically, after the initial transients have died down and a stable, pitched tone remains. Try setting your loop markers at the positive zero-crossing of one or more cycles of this pitched tone. For example, in the following illustration two waveform cycles have been selected as the loop, and the loop stat and end are both at places where the signal crosses the zero line, moving upwards. Once you find the right pitch, you may need to shift the loop left or right to find a place where the timbre is stable enough to work well. To move the looping region without changing its length, drag the middle Loop Handle.

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