Like I imagine many of you here (especially UK users) I get Computer Music magazine and on the cover CDs/DVDs they have loads of samples so over the years I've amassed thousands of them. My question is, how do people generally use them? do you spend ages loading them into samplers? I don't have any sampling software (Apart from the free CM one which I find complicated) or do you use them in other ways? I was just thinking that I should have a look at using them in some way but just don't know how best to go about it. Thanks!

well, no not really. i use Reason, and it's pretty easy to just load up a sample of something and get it going. People use samples every day- from drum sounds to piano sounds to samples of somebody talking about why it sucks that the platypus isn't in it's own catagory. a sample is just a sound that can be loaded up and played, that's it. there isn't anything else, really. to make the sample sound good, well, now thats a different story...

I use a renoise, a tracker. Trackers are historically sample-based music composition programs (though renoise can use VST's as well), so using samples with them is easy as pie.