Soundplant

Soundplant is a quite unique application that can be defined in multiple ways. Whether you call it a “digital audio performance program”, a computer keyboard sound triggering utility, or even an alternative to the nowadays-ubiquitous Launchpad-like hardware controllers, Soundplant is clearly surprising.

It is capable of turning your simple, average keyboard into a versatile, low latency, multitrack sample-triggering device, or in other words, into a playable musical instrument which can be used to create live, unique music in a rather easy manner. Anyway, Soundplant can be also used for less creative purposes as well, like for quickly triggering specific sounds and audio effects during a presentation or a live show.

Soundplant lets you create custom keymaps, by assigning any note or sound that you like to any key, or load existing keymaps and create new music using the sounds and notes of those keymaps. A few sample keymaps can be downloaded from the official website of Soundplant for free. That's what I did too, as assigning sounds to keys and creating new keymaps was a bit confusing to me, but I admit I'm also rather inexperienced when it comes to this kind of programs.

I also like a lot about Soundplant the fact that it comes as a standalone program, of decent size, that can be easily installed on any system, and not as a VST plugin or other form of software that involves additional requirements.

Another remarkable feature of Soundplant is the fact that it can play a huge amount of multimedia file formats. There's also a direct internal recording function that lets you capture, record, and save the Soundplant's playback output. Many more other features are also available; in fact it will take many pages just to quickly list them all.

To sum it all up, Soundplant is a truly impressive tool that leaves no room for disappointment.