SamplerBox is an electronic musical instrument. Drop audio samples onto it, hook up a MIDI keyboard, and you'll be able to play with realistic piano, organ, drums, etc. sounds!
The Samplerbox is a small device that plays pre-recorded instrumental sounds when it receives MIDI commands. Vintage products that do this include: ASR-10/EPS/Mirage samplers. Here are other similar products: Sound Modules
It's sample player. It's a MIDI sound module. It is a ROMpler. It stores the sounds of instruments and plays notes from those instruments when it receives MIDI note commands. Those sounds can be any WAV files. You can freely download sound files (samples and sample-sets) over the Internet, or you can record them yourself and copy the sound files into SampleBox. It can then receive MIDI from a MIDI keyboard controller, or any other MIDI device and play the sounds out an ordinary line-out jack.
The original Samplerbox project is described at this website:. https://www.samplerbox.org/ However that's outdated now. We're providing current (May 2023), much easier build instructions at http://chromakinetics.com/samplerbox/.
Extensive, detailed information on the latest Samplerbox development is at: https://homspace.nl/samplerbox/ Note: this website may be offline. Use the Wayback Machine to view the archived version of that website if necessary. There are a whole lot of pro-level features documented there that you can access, depending on how much complexity you want to deal with.
Good article on using a Samplerbox as a Mellotron replacement SamplerboxMellotronArticle.pdf
Full build instructions are at http://chromakinetics.com/samplerbox/
Required Parts
- Raspberry Pi 3B+ $35 or Raspberry Pi 4 (any memory size) (also should work on a Pi Zero 2, but these directions do not cover that model.
- Pimoroni Pirate Audio LineOut $25 Pimoroni website
- Power supply for Raspberry Pi (5V 2.5A with correct connector for the Pi model)
- MicroSD card at least 2GB (I'm using 16GB)
- a microSD card reader or microSD adapter (if your computer has a full-size SDcard slot built-in)
- a MIDI keyboard (either a USB keyboard or a 5-Pin DIN MIDI keyboard connected to a USB MIDI adapter)
