Artiphon

Out of the box, the pitch shifting of recorded samples doesn't preserve the tempo of the recording.  Low notes are drawn out and high ones ridiculous ly short. It's also why chorus mode doesn't work with samples, it sounds horrible. Is there a setting to change that? If not, it should be added. It's pretty basic and should be the default mode IMHO.  Hopefully I'm just a newbie who's just missing something.

God I wish we could edit!  My typos are killing me.

Did you figure out the issue? I'm having the same problem. 

It’s not you!

I believe that’s how it was implemented by design (and a poor one at that). As you so well put it, it renders sampling a pretty much useless feature. But at least it looks very cool on all the promo videos…

Let’s hope @Artiphon will surprise us with a proper sampling functionality one day!

The way a sampler works is by pitch shifting according to the played note. The pitch shifting is done by playing through the samples faster or slower. This works well for single note events or for longer samples if they are played at their original pitch. To add time stretching, which is not part of a sampler but does exist in some apps like Ableton Live for tracks- not in the sampler- the processing and memory would be very intense. For chords, the issue is that a single note sample works. If there is already a chord or just several notes in the sample, the chord will play that at 4 pitches according to the chord which will likely result in strange harmonics.

In short: It is a sampler so it is intended for single event samples. Or, if you want to use longer phrases, they can only be played at their root note if the tempo needs to be preserved.

Whenever I try to sample anything at all. The sample is automatically sped up. Even if the pitch is shifted down, the sample is still sped up but shifted down. It will not record a sample in its original form. Regardless of what type of sample or how long the sample is. 

Is there a way to get the original sound without automatically pitching it? Like one button being the original sound before it pitches on the other buttons going either up or down the octave? Kind of destroys the entire point of being able to sample by not having the original sample in the lineup. 

I know drum sampling is already possible today with a little ingenuity :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ny9TQ-hYHyE

@Arne Wallbrecher

I get the difficulty of implementing time stretching (I believe it’s also called warping) in real time on a device with limited processing power and memory. I typically see it implemented in professional grade software and hardware.

Probably a silly idea but is there the possibility of having it being processed externally by the app and then assigning each sound already stretched as an individual sample to each pad?

I've tried that too. Every file I import is then either stepped up or stepped down and the original sound is completely missing from the keys it assigns. I thought it would give me the original sound for the first note before tuning the rest up or down. Not just tune the entire sample. I've seen videos where a sample is taken and then able to be played in its original form as I wanted, yet when I do it, it's always tuned up or down depending on which preset I link it to. 

The Artiphon sampling algorithm is actually VERY smart at doing what it was intended to do. I know a lot of people are thinking of it from the hip hop DJ sampling perspective which is very cool, but that's not really how it was intended to work. The Orba 2 sampler tries to turn the sample into an instrument that will play notes that are in tune with the major and minor keys and scales that you can select for the Orba. I think the first thing the algorithm does is it tries to "clean up" the sample by getting rid of silence at the beginning and end of the sample. At least that's what it did to mine. Then it autotunes the sample so that it can play it in every key and scale that you select. So, it works best with individual notes, or words, or sounds like a single dog's bark, or a single spoken word, or a single note being played on an instrument like a didgeridoo, or a steel tongue drum, that kind of thing.

If you try to sample a complete passage, the Orba 2 app is going to try to autotune some part of that so that it can then speed it up and slow it down to turn it into a scale. You might get lucky and be able to find a note in a scale that is close to the original thing that you're trying to sample, but that will take some experimentation with the octaves and the keys. If you can find the right note, in the right key, in the right octave, you might be able to find something pretty close to the original sample in there.