I have a lot of equipment all running off a single midi clock: a couple electribes, MicroKorg, drum machine, my laptop, and my newish SP-404. Everybody gets along. Any pattern I start stays right in the pocket across all devices. Patterns on the SP-404 work fine as well.

Here's the question. Is there any consistent way to make a looped sample stay in time? I don't want to have to continually retrigger the sample. There are free DAW's that will squish and stretch any audio so it stays perfectly in time. On the SP-404 I can mangle the sample with "time stretch" but it won't stay in time with the BPM. I can set it to "Ptn" and it speeds up and down with the tempo, but the sample still drifts away.

Am I totally missing something or do I need a different sampler?

You just gotta edit it more precisely. It took me a while to learn...but my loops dont go out of sync these days.

I use Audacity and Sonar on my computer to create my samples. I can edit the length as precisely as I want.

Is it a question of importing a sample that is -exactly- 4 beats at 133 BPM?

Or do I need to add/delete from my sample on the SP-404?

Either way, there has to be a hardware sampler that can simplify this. I have thousands of samples on my PC that I plug into my DAW. I can stretch the clip over as many beats as I want at whatever the tempo might be at the time. The SP-404 makes a cool drum machine, but there's a little too much guesswork and voodoo in trying to get these loops to sync up.

It's not voodoo, it simply takes practice.

Bad choice of words. I meant I was looking for a more automated way of getting the samples to sync.

You get spoiled after letting computers and specialized software do all the work for you.

I see what you mean, didn't mean to sound blunt. In fact, I've had and often still have problems with it myself. Still, I got it to work for some samples already, so I know it's not impossible.

I'm using a SP-606 though, so I'm not exactly doing it all blind purely on hearing the sound.

There are tricks for getting it loop easier though. Sometimes it helps to take a longer sample and loop it, sometimes it helps to take two smaller ones and stitch them after eachother to make the loop. This depends on tempo.

Still, I'm by no means an expert on making loops, I tend to just do it by lots and lots of trial and error.