SampleTraxx Stigma review

Today we will be looking at the new hybrid library from SampleTraxx. The Stigma is a mixture of atmospheres and vocal textures that can either be used as a standalone samples or using the Kontakt sampler from Native Instruments.

Content

Stigma comes in a 2,5 GB bundle of atmospheres, drones, soundscapes and vocal textures at 24 bit and 96 KHz. There are approximately 150 sounds and about the same amount of patches for Kontakt. SampleTraxx took the concept of Voices of the Ages and expanded on it. That said, I have to say that the provided sounds are different yet they feel extremely close to the Voices of the Ages so if you purchased Voices of the Ages before you will enjoy this library.

One thing that stands out is that the library is somewhat all over the place. By that I mean that the developer tried to add additional sounds that don’t quite fit the theme of Stigma. That of course is just my personal thought. Vocal textures on the other hand sound great but I will get to that in a minute.

The asking price for the library is $32 bucks plus taxes which I think is fairly cheap for the amount of content.

Kontakt patches

This time around the Kontakt patches come with a few options but again nothing too spectacular in terms of tweak ability. You have two filters (low and high pass), pan and volume and ADSR envelope. Although the functions are minimal they still provide some basic sound tweaking. The down side is that every single sound comes in its own patch which means that you will either have to listen to all samples beforehand or drag each patch into the Kontakt. It would be nice to have one patch where all samples are mapped across the keyboard so that you can preview the sounds and then just choose the one you like from the patch menu.

Other than that, I am quite neutral on the Kontakt patches. Often I found myself using the regular media browser in Reaper than actually using the Kontakt patches.

Sound Quality

As with other SampleTraxx SFX libraries I think they provide quality sounds. This time around it is no different but there are some sounds that made me cringe a bit. For instance, in general I think the sounds are too loud. Often I had to lower the volume to enjoy the sounds. Some sounds also feel a bit muddy in the lower region of the frequency, especially around 200 – 300 Hz.

Having said that, I think the sounds are great. Vocal textures will fit nicely into your mix and thanks to the developer you also have the key in which the samples were recorded. That brings us to metadata.

The metadata is present in the filenames. It will give you some idea of the samples and the key in which the sample was recorded. One thing to note is that if you buy the library you might want to use 7zip as it supports long filenames and special characters that winrar or winzip might have issues with.

Conclusion

The Stigma is nice SFX library with great sound quality to it. I am sure it will find home with some of you. At the price of $32 it is not really that hard to decide if you need these types of samples. On the other hand I would rather see a pack of vocal textures at a bit smaller price than the whole package with some sounds I don’t actually need. Again, that would be a personal preference.