If sampling is your thing, but vinyl is a bit too antiquated for you, and you find most sample packs uninspiring, you might have a lot of fun with Samplette. This website turns YouTube into an almost endless source of samples in your browser. Just beware that it does not offer any help to clear the samples.
Sampling in the age of YouTube, Instagram, and Tik Tok
It’s no secret that YouTube has become one of the go-to source for samples for many producers, even if these often don’t have the highest quality. In fact, Gaspard Augé and Xavier de Rosnay from Justice recently said in an interview that they sometimes even prefer the “crunch” from the lower audio quality in many YouTube videos to the pure sound of recordings when it comes to samples.
However, it can be really time-consuming to find a good sample on YouTube. And we’re not just talking about the constant ads but also YouTube’s limited search functions. Wouldn’t it be great for virtual crate-digging if videos just started randomly and YouTube always played any content with background music? It would also be really helpful if there were more filter functions for genre, release date, key, and tempo – maybe even tap-tempo? That’s where Samplette comes in.
Samplette turns YouTube into an endless sample source in your web browser
Samplette is a website that’s been around for a while and is getting a lot of attention again. When you load the page, a randomly selected music video starts that might be perfect for crate diggers and sample hunters. You can also narrow down the sample roulette using Samplette’s filters. In addition, you can directly view the metadata from Spotify and Discogs for any song!
Samplette is pretty simple, and digging for new music is a lot of fun, which encourages you to keep coming back to the website. Two things can spoil the fun a little, but you can somehow fix at least one of them. It would be even better if you could route the audio signal from the browser and YouTube directly into your DAW – since there is no official way to save and download music from YouTube. However, there are various tools for routing system audio like Audiomovers or Inject or even plugins such as WebSampler, which is also free.
However, the legal situation might turn out to be an even bigger problem if you intend to release the track you’ve used the sample in. That is if you haven’t cleared the sample by getting permission from all involved parties. Because sampling other artists without their permission will likely cause issues and can get rather expensive.
Unfortunately, Samplette doesn’t take the work and effort of clearing individual samples off your hands. There are more straightforward, paid solutions like Tracklib that offer huge catalogs of songs to sample from and also offer ways to help with clearance. But if you just want to have a bit of fun for yourself, you’ll probably have a lot of fun with the free website.
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