Need a Simple Sampler/Floor Unit That Can Play Large Files.

[Lucifer66]

I would very much like a plain sampler, not a drum machine like all of the ones I see everywhere, or one that has a bunch of effects that I don't need or some synth or keyboard stuff either. All I want to be able to do is play pre-recorded sound bytes, some of them large, on stage during a live performance. I have a sampler, but it has all this drum machine crap I don't need, pressure sensitive pads, built in drum kits, reverb, tuner, looper, and such. The midi in doesn't allow me to use a foot controller to activate the samples so it's quite useless. To make it even more useless, it can use a 32GB SD card, but you can't have more than 60mb of data on it or you get load errors. What is the point of that? It won't load smaller mp3 files either so they have to be humongous .wav files, what a waste of space and it takes 3 minutes to load them, that is just stupid long. I mean the sampler I got has all the power of a Speak & Spell (those of you not old enough, look them up, a whole 8mb of memory and like a 1hz processor or something like that, pathetic). Sure, .wav files are lossless, but the human ear can't tell the difference between a .wav file and a .mp3 so why use a file that is 4x larger? Do you line your car with lead to make it ride lower too instead of lowering the suspension? It's the same logic.

Really what would be ideal, for me anyways, is a foot controller unit that has a sampler built in that can load mp3 files up to 20mb each. It would be a 10 bank of 10 samples and could load them instantly, pretty much like an mp3 player does. It would have stereo XLR output jacks so it would run into the PA and sound great. It would have a nice large display so you could see the file name, not some 8 character limit like the sampler I have. It would use a 32GB SD card, and be able to read AND load all 32GB of data and when I change banks it would load them quickly, like a second or so. I'm not talking about for a DJ, but for a live band here so that while I'm playing my guitar I can hit a button with my foot and play a sound I want or maybe a 3 minute intro with a bunch of sound effects I have pre-recorded for a song. That is the kind of stuff I'm talking about. It shouldn't cost all that much, maybe around $250-300 for something like that and it should be made out of steel since it is a foot controller with good switches that aren't going to fall apart.

I don't get why samplers are so limited on memory anyways, we have mini SD cards that are 300GB these days and samplers that can't handle more than 60mb. We have 8 core 3.0 Ghz processors for computers and these weak ass processors in samplers. My 12 year old Compaq Sempron with a 1.2 ghz processor was light years faster than any sampler out there and it's worth like $20 now for the whole PC. It's ridiculous. Everywhere I look people are complaining that they are getting load errors and "File Size Too Large" errors. Memory is cheap now so why cheap out on it? These things are going for $300-$2000 and they can only handle a few mb of memory? Well I want more for my money, I need something that will do the job right and the first company that makes it will get my business and probably everyone else's.