I need to find a vsti sampler that can play up to at least 30 seconds of an audio file with at least 8 slots and be used with a MIDI controller. Please!!

I use Shortcircuit 1 to make drum kits with some the free samples found online. It took a while to figure out but now that I'm up to speed it works very well. Having said that, the interface is extremely unfriendly to the untutored so you sort of have to press all the buttons to see what does what.

My top tips:

Switch your sample to "forward shot" to have the whole thing play through when you trigger it

Click on multi to save your sampler setup. Saving as a preset will work but if you need to go to another DAW or have to replace your computer say, you need that saved multi .scm file.

There are some good quasi tutorials on the webpage of the guy who made it. Look in the forums for tips. I think its Kember Audio.

Also it's a drag and drop thing. Make the mixcraft program window half sized say. Open the shortcircuit instrument in a mixcraft virtual track. Click edit on the instrument. The shortcircuit window pops up. Should show a keyboard. Open up your samples folder using windows explorer. Drag the sample and drop it on a key. That key will play your sample. The sample filename will show up in the lefthand column. Click on it and you modify, change its amplitude, add a few filters, eq it, etc. You may be able to set it so that clicking the midi once will trigger the sample and the second click will turn it off. Or you can make choke keys by assigning two keys--a sample key and a choke key--to a group. The choke key has a sample whose sound you turn of. You click on the group header in the left column, and move the polyphony to 1. That's how you do your hi hats, for instance. Three keys in a group, only one plays at a time.

Thank you SO much! this is exactly what i need!

actually, if i want to stop the sample from playing by hitting another note/trigger (or the same note), how do i go about that?

Ok. Here are the steps.

You'll need the sample you want to play and a choke sample for this.

1. Multi column of SC right click and choose create new group
2. Click on new group and set polyphony to 1.
3. Drag your sample and choke sample from a windows explorer folder to the new group by dragging and dropping them onto the keyboard for the note you want to trigger them. Say C1 for the sample and D1 for the choke sample.
4. Set the sample to "forward shot" and leave the choke sample as "forward" althoguh it doesn't really matter.
5. Click on the choke sample and turn amplitude to -144, as low as it goes. This toggles by clicking on it and holding and then moving mouse left to turn down.
6. That should work. Hit the sample key to play, hit the choke key to turn off the other on.

To set the start and end points of the sample: click on the sample file in the multi column. Waveform at top. Hover over left side of waveform window until you see a bidirectional arrow. Click and hold and move arrow to choose start point. Same on the other side for the end point.

Pretty sure that should work. Other ways to do it I'm sure, probably better than this. Check Kember forums.

If you want to play some of your samples simultaneously, you'll need to create independent groups, each with their own choke keys. You duplicate the choke keys. Like C1 could be the choke key in each group.

Now that I think about it I hope there is an easier way to do this!