teenage engineering EP-133 K.O. II Sampler Composer

Most Liked Positive Review

A Unique, Stylish BleepBloop Groovebox with Limits

This groovebox is a stylish 5-star product for some use cases, a 2-star product for other use cases, but overall a 4-star product in general considering the price-point, especially for those with disposable income who wouldn't rely on it as their only music-making product. The K.O. II advertises its 64 Megabyte sample limit very prominently, so it should be to no one's surprise how quickly that storage is filled up. This, like many samplers of old in the 90's, forces creativity with sample management if you're interested in sampling loops or longer samples. It can be good to have to work within limitations, to focus on creative output (finishing a song, that is). But with the K.O. II, it depends on your intended workflow. If you're interested in working with kinda-lo-fi one-shot samples (very short sounds, sequenced into rhythms and melodies), the K.O. II could be a 4 or 5-star product in your eyes. On the other hand, if capturing and slicing loops, or especially loading many loops (like classic drum break loops for example), with the goal of accurately chopping / slicing / rearranging / sequencing those loops, this might be a 2 or 3 Star groovebox for you. Teenage Engineering's web-based sample management tool for the EP-133 (which is intuitive, stylish, easy to use in general and overall excellent for most use cases) presented me with a challenge that rendered the product unable to meet a use case I hoped to have with it. That use case was to load many lo-fi (8-bit, 8khz sample rate) drum break loops into its memory, along with some long trailing atmospheric pad samples I had bought, for the purpose of producing atmospheric jungle drum n bass on the K.O. II. The slightly-limited sample chopping feature on board the product wouldn't have been too much of a hindrance, but unfortunately the sample manager did cause an issue for me. When uploading my many loops, which were extremely small in file size (on average, 400KB, that's kilobytes), the sample manager uploaded them into the K.O. II at a file size of around 1.3 MB (Megabyte) or greater. So, something about the sample manager causes my very lo-fi 8-bit / 8khz loops and samples to become about twice the size, meaning I can only fit about half as many samples onto the extremely-limited 64Mb sample storage of the EP-133 that I intended to. So if you're working with loops and hoped to have a plethora of them aboard the device for on-the-go loop slicing and sample mangling, you'll probably need to clear out all of the factory sounds, get your samples down to 16-bit / 12 KHz or so, and use very few of them at a time, if your hope was to finish a song in a portable location. It can still be done, but you're going to need to do sample management (on the computer) for almost every song or beat you work on (unless you're planning on using only one-shots with few to zero longer samples / loops) So I guess it's just a bummer that a device with an on-board microphone and stereo line-in doesn't fully support a robust lo-fi sampling workflow of decent variety and ease for producers of music like Jungle DnB, sample-based Hip-hop, field recording based projects, etc. In short, the Teenage Engineering EP-133 K.O. II is a 5-star proeuct when used as truly portable lo-fi Bleep Bloop Box (that you can build onto with toy construction bricks, for extra creative quirkiness) yet only a 2.5-star product as a legitimate Groovebox if loops and longer samples (lo-fi or otherwise) are your method of production. Stick with quick jabs, and this might really be a Knockout product for you. But if you're hoping for complex wrestling grapples and long holds, you'd be in the wrong ring with the K.O. II.