It appears that Samplitude doesn’t prioritise system resources for audio playback over housekeeping duties or the graphics card’s output. Meanwhile, resizing windows in complex projects caused glitches in playback. Saving of a particular project made our PC appear to hang for anything from a few seconds to three minutes – thankfully, automatic saving every ten minutes can be disabled. Reinstalling on a Windows XP partition on the same PC improved stability greatly, but we still experienced the occasional crash. We initially installed it on Vista and experienced numerous crashes. It doesn’t help that the manual is written in such an unbearably dull tone that we found it hard to get through a paragraph without absent-mindedly wondering what to have for dinner. The features include many non-destructive editing tools like the unique object editor which allows fades and diverse manipulation of the audio material in real time. Wading through lists of text is at odds with keeping the focus on the creative process. Samplitude 10 was created for demanding, professional recording, editing, mixing and mastering at up to 32 Bit/96 kHz.

Ultimately, our biggest concern is that Samplitude feels uninviting, with vast arrays of menu options and sprawling right-click menus.