Sales Pitch
It's no secret that 1BITDRAGON comes with numerous high-quality samples to choose from. However, one day, after investing enough hours into the product, you'll start to notice you've utilised every instrument it has to offer, and find yourself in a slump because everything is beginning to sound the same. Congratulations, you've saved the princess and beaten the game. But what if the game was endless?
Enter Sample Packs
A sample pack is a collection of instruments that can be shared amongst composers, or even created by yourself. At the end of the day they are just folders with audio files inside. A beatboxer could spit sounds into a microphone and use their own body generated noises as instruments, or perhaps you want that juicy 9-bit feel, so you create a sample pack that's a mixture of real instruments and square waves from the gameboy. The possibilities are endless!
Woah, that sounds awesome Polter, but how does it work?
Thanks for the great question! I won't pretend to know the internals of 1BITDRAGON, because I don't. But if it were possible, you'd have a "samples" directory in your root folder. Within that you create a folder for each sample pack. Underscores would be translated to spaces in the actual software, because let's be honest, using spaces in filenames is just plain wrong. So, if you wanted to create a gameboy percussion instrument named "Noise 1" for your "Chiptune" sample pack, it'd go in samples/chiptune/Noise_1.wav
if you wanted to share your samples pack with other people, simply zip up samples/my_pack and send it off for them to extract to their samples folder.
While the base instruments are already truly amazing, giving 1BITDRAGON the ability to load in custom instruments would increase its value tenfold, because no genre would be out of reach. Pair that with the tools simple, yet powerful interface and you've got the recipe for a great time.