Is Splice Worth It
Are you looking for a reliable and efficient music production software that empowers your creative process and offers better music developing opportunities? If yes, then you have landed on the righ.
Sample packs displayed on the Splice Sounds web siteThe service makes available a huge number of commercial sample packs that you can freely browse via Splice’s web site, once you sign up. According to Splice, there are more than 500,000 samples available, which come from about 1500 sample packs.One of the big differences in buying samples via Splice Sounds is that you can pick and choose individual samples (both loops and one-shots) from the various sample packs, rather than having to buy by the whole pack.Content includes both one-shots and loops. The collection is heavily weighted towards electronic dance music styles including House (12 different varieties), Drum & Bass, Dubstep Breakbeat, and Techno, to name a few.
There's also a good selection of urban content, including hip-hop, trap and a little bit of R&B.A Live Sounds section offers categories for Afro Latin, Blues, Jazz, Reggae, Rock and more, but it's clear the overall focus of Splice Sounds is not on these styles. And when you search through those 'Live Sounds' sections, many of the sample packs are geared more to electronic styles, with only a slight relation to the genre they show up under. For instance, the Blues category has seven packs, only three of which are devoted specifically to blues samples. One of the other entrants in the Blues category is 'Pablo Decorder Presents: Peak Time Berlin,' which is described as 'a collection of sounds that represent the collective sound of the Berlin underground party scene.' Blues?A great deal of the content comes from Loopmasters, but you can also find sample packs from developers like Black Octopus, Singomakers, Freaky Loops, and Monster Sounds, among many others.
According to a Splice spokesperson, they’ll be adding another major content partner sometime in September, and the number of available sounds on the service will continue to grow. If you’re a sample aficionado, you’ll feel like a kid in a candy store while browsing the Splice Sounds site. On the levelSplice Sounds is available at two price levels: The “Sounds 100” plan is $7.99 for 100 credits per month. The “Sounds 300” plan” is $13.99 for 300 credits. Each credit gets you one sample download.
If you don’t use all your credits in a given month, they roll over — to a point. For the Sounds 100 plan you can accumulate a maximum of 300 rollover credits in your account, and for the Sounds 300 the max is 1000. I question why Splice imposes these 'use it or lose it' type of limits. If you pay for the sounds, you should be able to keep their value, as long as you’re a subscriber.Splice Sounds allows you to upgrade or downgrade your account if you ever need or want to. So if you find that you aren't using enough samples to justify the $13.99 plan, or need more than the $7.99 plan, you can changeover. However, your rollover cap will adjust accordingly, so if you’re downgrading, you could lose rolled-over samples.All the samples have perpetual licenses, and can be used in any kind of production, royalty free.
Is Splice Worth It Good
The only restriction on their use is that they’re not transferrable to another person. What’s nice is that you don’t have to commit to more than a month at a time. You pay month to month, and you can cancel at any time (effective at the end of your monthly billing cycle, presumably). Your subscription auto-renews after each billing cycle, so it's up to you to cancel if you don’t want to continue to be charged.What’s nice about a content subscription such as this is that you can keep the samples after you’re no longer a subscriber. This makes it a better value than a DAW or plug-in subscription, because with those, you lose the use of the software if your subscription lapses, or the company goes out of business.
With Splice Sounds, once you download content, it’s yours forever. The Splice Desktop AppAfter you sign up, the next step is to join Splice (which is free) download the free Splice Desktop App (Mac/PC), which acts as a bridge between the Splice website and your computer. The app, which is accessed from the menu bar, is used not only for Splice Sounds, but for other Splice functions such as the backup of projects. For project backup, Splice only supports Apple Logic and GarageBand, Ableton Live, and FL Studio. Those restrictions don't apply to Splice Sounds, however, which is platform agnostic. Any DAW can handle WAV files, which is what you get when you download a sample from Splice Sounds. In search ofWith half a million samples to choose from in the Splice Sounds collection, a robust search feature is a necessity.
Luckily, Splice offers multiple ways to narrow down the massive amounts of sample packs and individual samples to find what you want.One way to go is to start by choosing a genre from the list on the Splice Sounds home page. You can then scroll through all the sample packs in that genre. Click on a pack to open it, and you get a list of keywords that correspond to the types of samples in a given pack, which shows how many of that type of sample the pack contains. In the pack in the screenshot below to the right, you can see that there are 538 drum samples, 71 FX samples, 43 percussion samples and so forth. Click on a keyword, and the results list will be narrowed down to only the corresponding samples. You can further refine it by BPM and key.Alternately, you can use the Search field to begin your search, and then refine after that.
Considering how much content is available, Splice Sounds makes it pretty easy to find what you’re looking for.I did occasionally get some odd results when searching. In addition to the aforementioned Berlin underground music in the blues section, one of the sample packs that came up when I searched the Afro Latin category was Balkan Brass and Breakbeats. Overall, though, the searching works well. When you open a sample pack in Splice sounds, one way to narrow down the results is to click on one of the instrument/category tagsSamples from a pack (whether refined by search or not) show up in the middle of the page in a list, which displays the sample name and duration, along with a waveform, keywords that it’s categorized under, an indication if it’s a loop or a one-shot, as well as its tempo and key.You can click on the play arrow to audition the sample. Most of the time playback starts immediately, although sometimes there’s a bit of delay while it's loading that doesn't always seem to correspond to the length of the sample.
I'm only talking about waiting a second or two for playback to start. It's not a big deal, but it seems a tad unpredictable.In any case, if you like the sample, you can download it to the Splice Desktop app or click a checkbox to make it ready to download with one click along with other samples you choose from the page.
Or, you can click on the the heart icon to save it to your Likes list, which shows up on the left hand side. That way you can mark samples you like for possible download, but don’t have to commit to downloading them right away. You can also save collections of samples in web-based folders called Repacks, which can be downloaded later and even shared. This allows you to setup project-specific sample packs, which is cool.Your computer must be running the Splice Desktop app in order to actually download samples. However, you can search, audition, and save samples to your Likes folder from any device connected to the Web, which means you can use your phone or tablet to search for samples when you’re on the go. Splice Sounds mobile site is nicely done. I was able to easily to search for samples from my iPhone.
A Splice in timeOverall, Splice Sounds is a good value for anyone who regularly purchases and uses samples, and who creates electronic dance music or hip-hop and other urban styles. For those genres, the Splice Sounds collection is large and impressive. If you create music outside of those genres, you won't find a lot to choose from.The site is well designed, the app integration is smooth, and everything works well. Yes, you get the occasional odd search result, and the delay before playback when auditioning a sample can be a bit unpredictable, but overall the functionality is quite satisfactory.I like that you don’t have to commit beyond a month at a time, and that anything you download is yours to use, royalty free, in perpetuity. I do hope Splice changes the rollover policy to let you save all your unused credits for later use, but I doubt that the rollover limits will be a deal breaker for most people.The Splice Sounds concept offers a different way to shop for samples, giving you more variety, and often better value than buying individual sample packs. However, it will change your workflow, so it won’t appeal to everyone.
Since you don’t have to commit for more than one month, you’re not risking too much to try the service out and see if it's right for you. Audiofanzine's review: Pros. Access 500,000 samples from 1500 libraries. Two price levels. Month-to-month subscription, no need to commit for longer. Multiple search options. Download samples into free Splice Desktop App.
Drag-and-drop samples into your DAW from Desktop App. Audition and mark favorites from any internet-connected device. 2015 massive soca pack part.6 trinidad carnival edition 2017. Repacks let you create custom collections and share themCons. Focused on dance and urban music, not much available for other genres. Limit on how many credits you can roll over. Searches occasionally produce non-related results.
Splice started life not all that long ago as a web service that allowed users of certain DAWs to upload their raw project data to the cloud and then collaborate with others. Or, store their own work in the cloud so they could open it on any computer to keep working on it. That free service is called Splice Studio, but the company has now created a different kind of service: Splice Sounds. Claiming to be a new approach to buying samples, it’s the kind of thing that has become possible only in the last couple of years with advances in web and mobile technology.So What Is It?Splice Sounds is an online catalogue of royalty-free samples – 700,000 and counting – from some industry-leading figures, companies and artists.
Where it differs from conventional sample packs is that it is entirely database-driven yet friendly to use.The developers say that they found people complaining that they would buy a sample pack and end up using only a fairly small percentage of the sounds inside it. The others were effectively useless to them. Worse, frustration with this can lead some people to pirate sample collections, which is not hugely difficult if you’re determined to do it. This is similar to the challenge faced by the recorded music industry, and Splice’s answer is not unlike the way that Spotify or Apple have responded to people’s changing music-buying habits – not to mention a way to try to discourage piracy.The idea, in short, is to let people search, audition and buy only what they want. The problem of having to buy a 3GB sample pack to get the 300MB of samples you actually want is a real one, though it’s not really the developers’ fault.
Splice Contact
The only alternative to selling whole collections is to make a searchable, micro-payment driven online system. That requires a lot of work, but it’s what Splice has done. You pay $7.99 a month, and for that you get 100 download credits, with samples costing one credit each.This limit is to stop people joining for a month and downloading the entire database before cancelling, which wouldn’t be very fair. It will also probably have the effect of making you consider more carefully which sounds you really do want rather than just downloading thousands without thinking. If you do cancel, you keep the samples you have already downloaded but lose access to download any new ones.
You can also choose to pay $13.99 a month and get 300 samples, though it’s not currently possible to pay extra if you want to go beyond this in any given month.The DetailsIn order to download sounds, you have to install a small application, and this is the same one that is used for syncing DAW project data, though the two tasks are separate things. A folder is created on your computer where downloaded files are stored, and you can audition and search them here, as well as revealing them in the file system. Files can be dragged from the Splice app straight into your DAW.You are encouraged to manage sounds in your online account via a browser and it’s possible to create ‘Repacks’, which are essentially collections of sounds that you can manage manually: electro kicks, piano loops and so on.This works well, though collections don’t seem to sync to your computer, so they’re easier to manage online.
The samples are downloaded when clicked, but any Repacks that you create online aren’t mirrored as named folders on your computer, which would be a nice addition. Repacks can be shared online with other users, a bit like curating a playlist for Spotify, and Splice has some artists already doing this.The process of searching for samples is really slick and benefits from a web interface that’s very responsive, laid out clearly and easy to use. At the top level, you have multiple search options and you can search everything using keywords, or filter down by categories such as drums, percussion, pads and so on.
Then there are genre-based categories: dubstep, house, techno and the like.Click into any of these and a selection of packs can be explored, each one curated and themed, and with a full demo track playable by clicking on it. From here, or from within a pack, you can filter down still further by selecting or deselecting tags at the top of the section. As well as the obvious tags, you get stuff such as one shots and loops, and the ability to filter by BPM or key.This all works extremely quickly and makes a lot of sense, which is vital if you’re going to base your system on searching for specific sounds. The tagging seems thorough and the loading fast. This all works from mobile devices, too, and since you’re signed into your account, stuff that you buy or organise on the move will be reflected on your studio machine as well.For any individual sound, you get a preview button to play it, and triggering a sound will cause any other playing sample to stop, which is really helpful in saving time and confusion.
You can flag samples, download them directly and add them to a Repack by using a shortcut or dragging and dropping. Selecting more than one sample illuminates a ‘download all selected’ type of button, and there’s also a randomizer sort button that will show you a random selection of sounds if you like.The computer arrow keys can be used to move up and down sample lists and preview them automatically, which again will save you a huge amount of mouse clicking.AlternativesThe alternative is what’s always been there, which is to buy conventional sample packs.
Is Splice Royalty Free
There’s nothing wrong with that, and some people may prefer it. You often get multi-format samples for example, with ReFill, REX and ACID versions of the same sounds, which you don’t yet get with Splice. You also get immediate access to everything you have bought, with no download limit. The two have fundamental differences of approach, however, so they’re not directly comparable.Sounds GoodThe samples are excellent, as you’d expect with partners like Loopmasters and Prime Loops providing a good chunk of the very varied and large library. The difference here is that you’re much more likely to be able to find the stuff you want, and find it quickly, than if you were having to plough through hundreds of sub-folders on your computer.In the same way that you might not bother buying an album if it needed shipping from overseas, you would be much more likely to listen to it on Spotify. In the digital era, convenience is king and this applies just as much to music producers as to regular consumers.Splice Sounds is a great idea and genuinely solves what has become a significant problem with the sheer number of sample collections on the market.
Namely, how can you be sure you will use even half the sounds you’re paying for? Piracy is an issue, too, and just like with online music streaming services and things such as Netflix, content providers are increasingly moving towards a subscription-for-access model.It’s happening in the music tech world, too – look at EastWest’s Composer Cloud, SONAR’s subscription model and other developers such as Adobe’s Creative Cloud. And people seem to be open to this approach, as long as the subscription price is reasonable and there are no penalties for cancellation. In the case of Splice Sounds, the pricing tiers seem very sensible when you consider the range of sounds on offer and the quality of the user experience. Expect to see more music technology go down this path. For now, Splice is leading the way for sample users.Key Features● Access from desktop or mobile● Audition any samples for free● 700k samples and growing● 100 or 300 downloads per month● Build and share your own Repacks● Downloads appear on your computer● Drag and drop straight to your DAW● Extensive searching capability● Artist-curated collections encode.