Getting Started

A quick tour

The Sitala window

From top to bottom:

The kit name (top left). Click it to switch kits. When you’ve changed something since the kit was last saved, you’ll see – Edited after the name.
The options menu (the ⋯ button, top right). Saving kits, MIDI settings, the pad layout and more live here.
The sample display shows the sample on the selected pad. This is where you trim, slice and preview samples. When you touch a knob, it shows what that knob is doing to the sound.
The pads. Each pad holds one sample. The pad with the dark outline is the selected pad; the display and the knobs belong to it. The small numbers show the pad number and the MIDI note that plays it.
The knobs — Shape, Tuning, Pan, Compression, Tone and Volume — change the sound of the selected pad. See Editing Samples.

A new Sitala instance starts with the Clean 808 kit, so there’s something to play right away.

Click a pad to play it and select it.
⌘-click (Mac) or Ctrl-click (Windows) to select a pad without playing it.
Play it from MIDI. By default, pad 1 is MIDI note 36 and the other pads follow chromatically. See MIDI for how that works with your DAW and controller.
Play it from your computer keyboard in the standalone app (this doesn’t work in the plugin):

1 pad 13 2 pad 14 3 pad 15 4 pad 16

Q pad 9 W pad 10 E pad 11 R pad 12

A pad 5 S pad 6 D pad 7 F pad 8

Z pad 1 X pad 2 C pad 3 V pad 4

Space plays the selected pad, and the arrow keys change the selection.

Start with an empty kit: choose New Kit from the kit menu (click the kit name) or the options menu.

An empty kit

There are several ways to get sounds onto pads:

Drag audio files from Finder or Explorer onto a pad. Drop several files (or a whole folder) and Sitala fills consecutive pads, starting with the one you dropped on.
Click Browse Samples… in the sample display to use Sitala’s built-in sample browser. Click a file’s name to load it onto the selected pad.
Right-click a pad and choose Load Sample… to use the normal file dialog.
Paste: copy audio files in Finder or Explorer, select a pad in Sitala and press ⌘V / Ctrl+V.

Sitala reads WAV, AIFF, FLAC, Ogg and MP3 files on every platform, and M4A and CAF on macOS.

When you load a sample, Sitala:

names the pad after the file (you can turn that off in the options menu with Automatically Set Pad Name to Sample Name),
trims silence from the start of the sample, and
if the file looks like a loop with several separate hits, offers to slice it to separate pads.

Once your pads are filled, save your kit.