The Kraftwerk sample is legal, and Bitwig rebuilt its Sampler — Sunday Loop #014
Why Sunday Loop exists
The week moves fast. Between work, sessions, and everything else, the good reads get lost in the noise.
Every Sunday evening I share a few links — things I found worth reading during the week. Logic Pro, sound design, sampling, the occasional curveball. No algorithms, no filler. Just a few things I’d genuinely recommend to a friend.
Grab a coffee. It won’t take long.
— Ewald
This Week
1. Sampling Copyright EU 2026: BGH Delivers Final Ruling, Kraftwerk Sample Stays Legal
Category: Sampling
Almost 30 years after Moses Pelham lifted two seconds of “Metall auf Metall” for Sabrina Setlur’s “Nur mir”, Germany’s Federal Court of Justice has closed the case. The sample stays legal as pastiche: transform a fragment and place it in a genuinely new artistic context, and you’re creating, not copying. Straight lifts without transformation remain risky, and Pelham still has to pay damages, but the bigger question is settled. If you build on samples, this is the clearest line a European court has drawn so far.
2. Bitwig Studio 6.1 launches with a “radically updated” Sampler device
Category: Sampling
Bitwig asked what a modern sampler is and shipped every answer at once. The rebuilt Sampler slices in five modes, from equal divisions to onset and pitch detection, finds the root key on its own, and gets four play engines: Spectral time-stretch with a Reharm mode, Fragments granular with up to 256 grains per voice, Repitch with analog or digital character, and Cycles as a wavetable-style oscillator. Free on an active Upgrade Plan; Spectral and Fragments need the full version. Even if you never leave Logic, this is a good yardstick for what a sampler can do in 2026.
3. GCS Spectral: Draw or Resynthesize Any Sound
Category: Sound Design
An additive synth you can paint. Gulf Coast Synthesis Spectral puts 32 partials on a canvas with a brush tool, resynthesizes any WAV, AIFF or FLAC, and reads images as harmonics, with pixel brightness becoming partial amplitude. Pitch drift, tape warble, saturation and dropouts sit on top. Dubspot rates it 8/10 and flags the 32-partial ceiling and the small preset library. VST3, AU and AAX, $39.99 intro instead of $69, with a 10-day trial.
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