SampleNinjas have announced the release of PO-12 Sample Pack, a free (the price is now increased to $5) collection of one shot drum samples made with the Teenage Engineering Pocket Operator PO-12 Rhythm drum machine.
These battery powered Pocket Operator mini synths by Teenage Engineering look like totally awesome little noise makers and they’re also quite affordable. The starting price for all three models is €69, however it seems that the drum machine model (PO-12 Rhythm) is already sold out.
See also: Free Nintendo Game Boy Drum Samples!
Luckily for us, SampleNinjas sampled every last Byte from their PO-12 Rhythm drum machine and have packed all of those sounds into a freely downloadable sample pack. Here’s what Bradley from SampleNinjas told us about the recording process for this sample pack:
I hooked up the PO-12 with a 3.5 mm cable and ran it through a Belkin Rockstar headphone splitter and directly into my MacBook Pro. The reason for using the splitter, the PO-12 gives off some feedback sound when touching it while plugged in with just the direct cable out to Mac connection, the Belkin offered some shielding. I did all the editing of the samples in Ableton Live 9, i.e setting end points and then bouncing to WAV (the most time consuming aspect were the editing and file naming). All effects are from the PO-12.
The sample pack can be downloaded for free from the SampleNinjas website (linked below) and it is released on a pay what you want basis (actually, the sample pack is now priced at $5). The included samples are royalty free. The actual drum hits sound really cool and they’re neatly sorted into separate folders for easy browsing. Take a listen to the audio demo embedded below to hear the sounds in action and check out the official PO-12 Rhythm demo video if you want see how the actual unit works. Being a huge fan of mini synths and quirky noise making machines, I’m totally impressed with it!
UPDATE: This sample pack can not be downloaded for free anymore. It is now priced at $5.
Audio Demo
Check out the PO-12 Sample Pack audio demo:
Download
PO-12 Sample Pack is available for purchase via SampleNinjas (80.94 MB download size, 266.9 MB when extracted, contains 666 drum samples in 24-bit WAV format).
