MusicRadar

Emulator X3 ships with some quality sounds, and it's easy to create your own.

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• Review

E­MU almost single-handedly brought digital sampling to the masses with its Emulator series of hardware samplers, the first of which debuted in 1981.

It goes without saying that the company has amassed a fair bit of knowledge and notched up a number of innovations in the three decades since. Emulator X3 is, as the name suggests, the third virtual instrument in the software-based Emulator X line, which, as we shall see, has a lot more to offer than the hardware of yesteryear.

Emulator X3 carries on where its predecessor left off. This Windows-only instrument is available in both standalone and plug-in flavours. There are versions for both 32- and 64-bit operating systems, and the new Xstream engine that powers X3 is said to be optimised for both, with intelligent multicore/processor support, too.

Thankfully, the company has ditched the oddball copy protection scheme that required its own MIDI interface to be connected in order to fire up the software.

Sounds

X3 ships with a huge selection of some of E­MU's finest sounds, including the entirety of the bank from its rather brilliant and trend-setting Xtreme Lead hardware ROMpler. There's a 1.4GB monster of a grand piano in the set, as well as a complete GM bank.

Coming from the company that took full advantage of the analogue revival with its Vintage Keys module, you'd expect X3 to contain some serious vintage sounds, and these are among the most impressive patches in the bundle. There are some especially sweet Hammond Organs, complete with churning Leslie effects.

Orchestral instruments are also accounted for, and there are some decent single-hit and ensemble FX included, too.

Importing

Of course, this being a sampler, you can bring your own patches to the party. It'll import all major file types, including WAV, AIFF and REX, and will handle resolutions up to 192kHz/24-bit

If you've got Akai, SF2, Kontakt, GigaSampler or HALion patches lying about, and even EIII and ESI patches from E­-MU hardware, you can bring those in, too, courtesy of the included special version of Chicken Systems' Translator (the only limitation being that it only converts to X3 format).

We had mixed results with this, depending on the formats used. Older, common formats like Akai and SF2 worked a treat. However, on the flip side, a patch translated from GigaStudio 4 crashed X3 instantly, despite appearing to have been converted successfully.

Unfortunately, Kontakt 3 files aren't supported, but Kontakt 2 patches seem to work well enough. Format quirks aside, Translator enables users to avail themselves of a variety of material.

Tweaking

Emulator X3 really comes into its own as a sound design tool, with a few features in particular warranting special attention. First off, X3 is that rarity of rarities – a sampler that actually samples from a variety of sources. Indeed, it has a full complement of features designed to eliminate the tedium normally associated with sampling.