Sampler?

[Zephyr]

Hey guys, I'm wondering if anyone knows of a free vst sampler, I'm looking for something along the lines of Direct Wave from FL studio, only it just needs to be able to load sample banks, (kind of like a soundfont, but I don't really want to make a soundfont for every sample set I use) Sorry if I'm not being specific enough, thanks for any help you can give.

[Yoozer]

http://vemberaudio.se/shortcircuit.php

[DrManhattan]

Is it VST or VSTi? And for what instrument or for what exactly?

[Zephyr]

Samplers are VSTi's, (or standalone, ) What it does is it takes samples that you give it, usually sample sets, and organizes them across the keyboard.

Say you have guitar samples, you took a sample of playing C5, if you use that sample in a song and play all the way down to C3, it's gonna get pretty distorted trying to play that low, but if you took samples of C1, C2, C3, C4, etc. then you would have one sample for every octave and it would really cut down on distortion. Normally in most DAW's you can only have one sample active at a time, and even if you did activate them all it would play all of them every time you hit a key. A sampler takes the samples and spreads them across the keyboard according to their relative pitches. So that you can put in all of the samples, and have an instrument that will automatically stretch and pitch bend the right sample for the range you're playing in. Hope that clears it up.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sampler_%28musical_instrument%29