lawajava
I'll bypass the conversation about whether Kontakt is a sampler.

But, I will point to a recent link from Plugin Guru that illustrates how he's made it easy, easy to grab any Wav files you have on hard disk and drop a them into Kontakt - complete with all sorts of controls.

This is very illuminating and he has added to the convenience of Kontakt to play samples.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQR1PWjXA2k

John 'Skippy' Lehmkuhl is the magician of all things Kontakt and Omnisphere.

"Samples are everywhere. Everything that can be sampled has been sampled at least 10 times over. The world is glutted with samples."

A quote that probably exists somewhere but maybe nowhere.... until now. :-)

stevec

Fleer

Kamikaze
In the 90's, I had an Alesis Quadrasynth.

Still have the original one. Never even tried it. Dern.

OT, but...   I still have a Quadrasynth + Piano (8MB!!!) and use it for live gigs to this day.  In fact, it's the only keyboard I use, 20 years later. 
 

I had the rack with added piano sample. It was the Quadrasynth S4+

Now that's an idea. Should be possible with the newish AutoSampler function in MainStage. You can get that if you're on a Mac for $29, as it's not part of Logic Pro X.

I think sampling is as exciting as it ever was.  The real interest is sampling your own input sources and making totally unique presets.  But you don't need a hardware sampler to do that these days.  You can just make recordings with your DAW and edit and do some pre production work on the sounds and then import into those software instruments that allow it.  And Iris2 is one of those.  It does some amazing stuff that goes far above any hardware sampler of the past.  It can transpose in pitch and time like a normal sampler does but also now easily just do one or the other as well.  The spectral synthesis engine can do some seriously amazing stuff.
 
Some hardware instruments can still do some weird things though like the EMU hardware machines of the past have what is called Transform Multiplication.  This unique function merges two sounds together so that frequencies common to both sounds are accentuated while uncommon frequencies are discarded (also called Convolution).  Because of this characteristic, Transform  Multiplication tends to work best with sounds that are harmonically rich.  Transform Multiplication is a powerful synthesis technique which can produce strange and beautiful timbres.  Eg if one sample is the sound of waves at the beach and the other is you whispering after this process the waves end up whispering.  Nothing like layering these two sounds.
 
EMU samplers can also do some amazing stuff too like modulate the pan position with an LFO for every voice within a preset! So the stereo position of every voice can be moving in its own stereo field at its own rate and depth. With a big pad for example this has to be heard to be believed!
 
If you can get your own raw materials easily into Kontakt then that is excellent.  It means you can experiment on that level as well.  There are plenty of software instruments that allow you do it too.
 

Glyn Barnes
I have had a few goes at making my own Kontakt libraries.

1- Record every semitone of the instrument in Sonar.
2- Split the track into individual notes
3- Adjust tuning in melodyne if required.
4- Export WAV files and edit them Audacity.
5- Import and map the samples on Kontakt.

Its still a bit amateurish as I am yet to introduce velocity layers and round robins.

Fortunately Hollow Sun have a nice scripted front end that adds filter, envelope and other controls with minimal effort. http://www.hollowsun.com/...ts/gui_shell/index.htm

 
I've tried making my own Kontakt instrument and in the end, what with the complexity and scope of sampled instruments these days, I figured I'd just leave it to the experts. Ain't got time for that. 
 
Having said that, taking a simple "one sample per key" approach to an instrument does get you that retro sound from back in the day, especially if you take one sample and re-pitch it to multiple keys. If that sample is a chord then you get that old skool techno sound from back when chord samples were played at different pitches resulting in some often weird parallel harmonies. If the sample has a rhythmic element then you get some odd timing when playing it back at different pitches, another retro techno sound. 
 
It's fairly easy to splice a drum loop across the keys with Kontakt though, something I'd be grateful for if I didn't have Geist. 
 
 

wavsaur is a nice editor also, I use it for finding loop points easily, really quickly
 

I wonder if you can drag a clip from Sonar's track view into Kontakt's sample map? I will try this later.

bitflipper

filtersweep
Apparently I'm old school on this having gotten into this in the 80's when a "sampler" could actually sample. I guess today, with seemingly endless sample libraries readily available, the distinction for most is meaningless. But they wouldnt have called it a sampler back in the 80s!☺

 
Early samplers had to include everything you needed for recording and editing audio files. Buying the necessary gear separately would have been horribly expensive and clunky. 
 
 

That's true. I have an Akai Z8 that I got around 2002. I haven't done any sampling with it, but I didn't plan to, although I have used it for some re-sampling. You could not only get realistic sounds, but sounds from classic synths and keyboards and, of course, mix and match. The other choice would have been a ROMpler, but then you were pretty much limited to what the manufacturer provided. I have almost the complete Akai sample library as well quite a few libraries from Hollow Sun.
 
I've also converted S-550 samples to the Akai format and I've converted/imported Akai samples into Alchemy. Now that we have software based sample players the ability to sample isn't a big deal to me, I just want to be able to add sample libraries. I've done a little sampling in the the past and I've fixed/improved some poor looped samples, but getting good loops is a lot of work, I prefer to leave that to the professionals. 

rsinger
I've also converted S-550 samples to the Akai format and I've converted/imported Akai samples into Alchemy. Now that we have software based sample players the ability to sample isn't a big deal to me, I just want to be able to add sample libraries. I've done a little sampling in the the past and I've fixed/improved some poor looped samples, but getting good loops is a lot of work, I prefer to leave that to the professionals.

Hey rsinger is there any way I could get a copy of your S550 samples converted to Akai format.  Be happy to pay you too.  Are they in Akai CD ROM format?  I only say this because both my Kurzweil and EMU hardware samplers are actually very clever enough to be able to read both Roland and Akai libraries without a hitch.  Pretty cool feature really.  I have extended my EMU library because of this to now include pretty extensive Akai and Roland libraries as well.  Of course the same sounds in the EMU actually sound nicer to me!

Glyn Barnes

abacab

Glyn Barnes
I wonder if you can drag a clip from Sonar's track view into Kontakt's sample map? I will try this later.

I would imagine so.  But I don't have the full Kontakt sampler, so I tried it with the TX16Wx sampler. Also checked it with the Structure sampler.  That works as well.

I just tried this. Its very simple to drag an audio clip from Sonar directly into Kontakt's sample mapping. This provides a very easy workflow for basic tasks.

So in this context, Kontakt can be a "real" sampler, right? 
 
It's just a matter of workflow and signal path.  You can bring a raw sound waveform into Kontakt, via the host, and then manipulate it as you wish.
 
Sonar just provides the input/output architecture at this point.

abacab
So in this context, Kontakt can be a "real" sampler, right? 
 
It's just a matter of workflow and signal path.  You can bring a raw sound waveform into Kontakt, via the host, and then manipulate it as you wish.
 
Sonar just provides the input/output architecture at this point.

Well the combination of Sonar and Kontakt if you want to split hairs, but its not too difficult to record a clip and map it in Kontakt.
 
If you want to map existing samples you can also drag and drop from Sonars browser. Quite handy as you can audition the sound and then drag it in.
 

bitflipper
One person (reasonably) asks if Kontakt can sample, others say SONAR needs a sampler. Anybody else see the irony there?
 

I won't make it too easy but Craig Anderton has some pretty nifty tutorials on how to record samples, plot them up and create loops etc all in one program we all have access to. Would that be a sampler?