Update 7/1/2019: We’ve had a chance to play around with the sampler and new firmware and it’s… awesome. - On drum tracks you can slice each hit and assign to a key individually - On melodic tracks it will pitch change your one shot sample (just like OP-1) - Totally possible to slice without the iOS app. Pretty intuitive LEDs interface. - You can now use the OP-Z as an audio interface. That means you can plug the usb c directly into your laptop and record it in. We weren’t able to get audio out to work, but just being able to record it right in without any other gear is pretty sweet. Forums report you can also record into your iPhone. - Holy cow this is amazing.
The long wait for sampling is finally over, Teenage Engineering just added firmware 1.2.5 to their downloads section which adds OP-Z sampling. You can download it here (see instructions for how to install it). While early demos have shown you don’t need the app to sample, it might be useful to get started and find your way around.
This brings OP-1 style sampling to the OP-Z, something that really makes this a dream machine (in our humble opinion). We haven’t had a chance to dig into too much yet, but will report back with results.
Also make note the warning in the firmward release notes that this update will impact the use of previous custom samples so you may need to mess with settings, levels, and gain to get things sounding identical as before.