Boss SP-202

This thing is really easy to use. You've got separate buttons for every action and they light up when activated

4 note polyphony off the internal memory, sadly you can play only one sample off a sm card at a time.
There's midi in, and I sometimes trigger it with my MPC and midi keyboard.
I think you might be able to change the parameters via cc's as well but I am not sure.
It's a dj sampler, and it fits me really well.
filters are nice, time stretching works pretty good too

in hi fi mode it sound great, but using lo fi modes you can get real gritty sound

It works. BUt it eats batteries pretty fast...

Never had anything to do with them

I would get it again If it were lost or stolen.
I have it for 3 month or so. My MPC1000 is way too heavy and expencive for live dj gigs, and you have to load it up everytime.
I wish it had a Li-Ion battery and a little screen where it would display filenames off a better card

I have the manual for the sp-202 in pdf format, if you want it, email me haleyness@hotmail.com and ill send it for free!
(please leave this on here as i was always in search of the damn manual and never found it and often came here to check for a post like this!)

this item is so damn easy to use.. if you cannot use it with minimal capacity.. you have no business even being a musician. a chimp can operate this thing.

effects are simplisitc. and the sound quality is good.. i bought this thing mainly for the portability aspect. meaning it runs on aa batteries. great for dropping breaks on yr headphones on the bus. the sp 303 offers no such convienience.

this item is good for use with funk and soul.. crisp jazz breaks and power drumming.. it fails to meet expectations if not properly amlpified..and the technology is somewhat obsolete. but other than that we have a winner.

i rely on this thing.. it is a good idea not to expose this thing to cold.. and or moisture. everything else is cake.

the 4mbcards for this item are harder to find than pitates booty. but if you find them.. its all good.

This thing is pretty darn easy once you get the hang of it.

Of course a sampler in this price range is limited in the features compared to a rack sampler for example. However dont be fooled this puppy has enough features to help you make kick ass tracks. You will need to get some "older type" 5 volt smartmedia cards for this machine and they are only available now on eBay. They cost like $45 each but man are they worth it!! You can load a lot of samples on a card (up to 35 minutes in lofi-2) so they are the KEY to this machine. You gotta find em. Do NOT try to use regular 3.3v smartmedia cards. they wont work. If you wish to use this baby live, then get at least 4 or 5 cards if you can. You will be very glad you did! This machine is the best SP model out there. Not sure what happened but the SP-303 has more features but its not as good sounding or feeling to me.

Sounds is great really for what it is, it sounds unbelievable for this price range. Would work for many kinds of music i believe.

They are built rock solid like a Boss pedal. Virtually indestructable more or less unless you throw it at the wall. ;-)
No problems so far and i have owned it since 1999!

They are ok once you get thru to a real person.

Yes, i would buy it again. Actually i own 3 of them and have a whole bunch of smarmedia cards for it. As i said before the KEY to this machine and getting your full value out of it is that you will NEED to FIND the 5Volt SmartMedia cards. and eBay is the only place that has em. Roland has been out for a long time. So get some cards NOW before they are gone forever and enjoy the DR.

requires a precise sense of timing...kind of irritating...i had no manual so i had to figure out how to use it (not too terribly difficult)...learning to use it is one thing...mastering it is another...

it's got a couple of filters, but the lo fi and lo fi 2 recordings are alot of fun to use. not only that, but this is great field sampler because it's battery op. The on board microphone isn't that great...you're better off finding a powered condenser microphone to get higher gain.

another cool thing about this unit is that you can plug a guitar, keyboard, bass, etc. through the mic input and mess with the filters. i mean...you COULD get a pedal...but....

sometimes the mark function for editing the beginning and end points of a sample are REALLY volatile it seem to get it on point with accuracy.

onboard effects are feh....it's alot of fun to build low fi creations with this thing that sounds like they were drug through the dirt, broken apart, and then reassembled. the main reason i bought this thing was for the low fi recording options.

fairly reliable...however, one of the memory banks on my unit has been corrupted (?) and refuses to erase/write to it.

n/a

main use: recording samples in lo fi. using this unit in tandem with another sampler/sequencer such as an mpc 60 (which I have) makes life more fun. even as a stand alone unit, you can make some pretty fun noise with this.

It is not a stompbox, but it isn't much harder than one. You must read the manul (which isn't too awful) if you want to do certain things (like truncate samples). Labeling on the front could be better.

First, the good stuff. The sample quality is certainly good enough for live applications and acceptable for lo-fi recording (not serious stuff, but you wouldn't use this for that anyway). It is intended as a live tool, and as such I think it works well. Samples can be stopped mid-phrase, something the SP-303 and the Korg ES-1 can't do. Once you have learned the buttons it is very easy to move around quickly. Midi functionality is simple but works well. BPM calculator works as would be expected.

The not so good stuff. The feature set of the SP-202 is outdated in a number of very important ways. The filter and ring mod effects are almost totally useless, but the pitch, time and delay effects are ok, albeit very limited. The onboard memory is terrible, and it only accepts antique 4mb Smartmedia cards which fetch over $60 on line. I bought one because I couldn't take the limitations of the internal memory, but to my dismay I have discovered that the card once formatted by the SP-202 will not be read by my Smartmedia card drive, so I am **unable to back up to or load from a computer**. This, kids, is not good.

The RCA outs are an irritant if you use 1/4" plugs. The headphone jack is oddly 1/8" (?!?). Mark function is fiddly (it will not always act as a start/stop marker when you are attempting to truncate samples).

All in all, the feature set is outdated. However, the unit is fun to use.

Sounds about as good as the samples you load into it, though it has a certain grungy character even when running without any of the onboard effects. Things can get very dirty with this unit, which I like about it. Effects as mentioned are not all the best, but I like the effect the short delay can have on things and the time effect is wonderfully digital ugly.

Plastic housing and I wonder about the long term reliability of the buttons, but I haven't had a problem with it so far. This is not a Boss tank.

Whatever.

I bought this unit a few years ago and paid too much for it even then. I don't think these are worth the prices being fetched online. This is at most a $50 unit, because of the limitations on memory. You will have to find 2 or 4mb smartmedia cards (and lots of them, really) if you don't want to be constantly overwriting your samples, which you'll have to record directly onto the SP-202.

All that said, I do think this little box has a place as a fun, flavorful unit that can spice up a track or two. It is definitely intended for live use and it works well for that. Just don't expect to have a full-on phrase sampler when you get it into your hands!

Very Easy!
Moi facil de usar, en 5 minutos estaralo utilizando.

It's a TOY.
E un xoguete para samplear, moi simple, pero moi divertido tamen.
En poucas palabras e un sampler de frases, con efectos; ideal para tratar loops e levalo o direito; NOTA; o sonido e suxo!

IMPORTANTE; esta maquina so merece a pena a un prezo moi baixo.

PEGAS:
-Pouca polifonia.
-Tarxetas SmartMedia, moi dificiles de conseguir.

It's DIRT. Very DIRT.

Nom esperes calidad de som, e un sampler suxo!!

Moi bon para direito e para tratar loops.

ok.

REPITO:

Nom pagues mais de 150 euros, por este prezo e unha maquina fantastica!!!

Por mais e un timo, demasiada limitada en todolos aspectos

Not very easy to use. A pain in fact. All based on manual timing, can't adjust loop points or sample length, and even so I couldn't seem to get it to be very precise. Basically, it advertises as a performance sampler, but I found it almost impossible to use as such.

This box talks a good game, but doesn't live up to it. 4-channel polyphony? Only on low quality sound (and only on the 22 seconds you can hold on the 500k internal memory; external memory cards are 2 voice polyphony). Great built in effects? The only effects that are any good are the filters, and they aren't even that cool. Ring modulation, yay, make your sample sound completely unrecognizable. Plus, throw on the effects and forget about polyphony: On the internal memory with an effect on, you get two voice polyphony; samples on a memory card can only play one at a time with an effect on. As for having lots of space (upwards five minutes of recording time, according to the specs, on a memory card) I maxxed out the internal memory on my first use. Also, the device claims to record to exactly the right length sample, based on the BPM. Every attempt I did to get it to record in this fashion failed miserably.

The sound quality is a joke: Highest quality recording is only 21khz recording, and the lowest is a dismal an intelligible quality, something like 4khz. I'm pretty sure it's 16-bit all around, which is nice, but it doesn't make up for the low sampling rate. The effects aren't terrible, but with only one knob to play with on each one, the effects get boring pretty quick.

Batteries are terrible. Burned them out in a matter of minutes. (25 or so minutes after putting in 6 fresh batteries the device would crash and die.) I didn't have any trouble with losing data, or any kind of reliability trouble.

I gave mine away. It was useless to me. My POS Gemini Scratchmaster mixer has a pushbutton sampler on it that I prefer. The newer model (SP-303) seems to address all of my major problems with this one, interestingly enough: The ads say it has more memory, 8-voice polyphony (which means all 8 buttons simulaneously), better quality sound, and more versatile effects. But, I'm not so sure I trust it: The SP-202 said it had 4-voice polyphony, great realtime effects, and high quality sound. And none of that was true. I still haven't played with one yet, though.

Very easy. I have the manual and the video too, so that helps, but it is very easy to work with.

Very cool at what its supposed to do. I like how simple it is and that it uses batteries AND has expandable memory using 5v smartmedia cards. The cards are a bit hard to find but I have managed to find a good handful of 4MB-5V cards on eBay and I still see them for sale over there. The cards allow you to really use this baby. Without the cards, you are very limited!!

Sound great!! Its no Akai S5000, but hey its amazing how good it sounds for only $150. Has an uncanny "real" sound to it.

Boss builds everything like a rock!!

they are cool

I love these things. I have 2 of them that I use with the DR-202. You really gotta use these 2 together. They are a dream pair of inexpensive yet expressive & impressive quality for sure!! You cannot go wrong with the SP-202. Better than SP-303 or SP-505 or even SP-808 in my onpinion. A good buddy of mine owns the 202 and the 808. He hardly ever uses his SP808, but always uses his SP202. I keep one handy in my car to snatch up cool samples when Im out and about......hey you never know when that kitten will purr (heheheh). Anyway SP202 is KILLER DEAL!!

Simple. audio in and out, built in mic, and a 1/4" mic input. big buttons, with a solid feel to them, everything laid out in front of your, no lcd's just a digital readout.
Super simple
the manual was complete enough, but the device is simple to use and I only read it while i'm on the toilet or something like that.

4 voices of poly. could be more, but you dont need it. a human drummer cant use more then 4 voices, so its ok. if you resample to a externam rec. device like tape, cd, dat or (what i use) mini disc, resampling is a breeze and no loss of poly to have your bass kick with some effects
simple effects, all of them are not very good, one of the filers is ok. time strech is useless.
midi in, no out or thru (would have liked to see more midi on here, mainly for dumping samples to my pc)
no velocity sens., the sequencer is hard to use, but hey, its meant to be used realtime. BEWARE it is not a step time sequencer. the unit wasnt meant to do that, if you want to do drums with a step time sequerncer then buy a drum machine.

the sound you get out is directly proportional to the sound you put in. the box has some hiss, but play with the effects a little and you can get rid of it.
good only for electronic music (dance/hip-hop) i use it for hip hop, works good for that.
it reacts well and realtime i have had zero trouble with it, just make sure to spend some time editing your samples. it makes a big differnece with this machine. I also found that if i fade the volume on the sample source as it ends, i can get some real cool decaying sounds out of it.
the low sample rate samples i have sound tough and old skool, very nice.
the effects, as i said, sound ok, nice for the price of this thing.

never broken, looks solid and feels solid despite being made of plastic. i use it almost xclusivly as a portable and i fell right on it once, and it was no worse for the wear.
i'd gig with it w/o ?, the light up pads are easy to see in the dark. i have done work in the backseat of a car with my phones, md, and this in the dark so i like that.

never dealt with them, but Roland/Boss is famous for incompetent boobery.

id cop it again. I use it with
1- sony digital mic
2- md recorder/player
3- portable drum machine
4- homemade audio mixing circuit
5- portable powered speakers
6- headphones
as a portable studio/project sketchpad, just to try ideas
its much easier to get them down like this, as opposed to powering up my asr-10 and my mpc, my comp and the rack. with this, in a small bag, i can go anywhere, sample anything and make a beat anyplace, for a cypher or just for fun.