It's such a fine syntactical line between "samplers" and "sample players." Most plugin samplers are actually just sample players, but not the Dangerous Bear Underground Prometheus X. Not to be a sample-play-a-hate-a, but Prometheus leaves those other so-called-samplers in the emm-effing dust.

Prometheus X is one of the few sampling-soft-synths than can actually record its own samples. Based on the WusikEngine v 5.6.2, Prometheus supports .wav, .sfz and proprietary WusikSND and DASHsnd format samples. These samples can be endlessly manipulated with Prometheus, and host-sync-sequenced with the included WaveSequencer, which can also be used to automate pitch, pan and other modulation parameters.

The basic features of Dangerous Bear Underground Prometheus X include:

• Six layers, each addressable by a different MIDI channel and with its own output, two of which may be used as wave-sequencers.
• Four resonant multi-mode filters plus four-band EQ per layer.
• Dedicated volume envelope per layer, plus eight multi-wave LFOs and eight assignable ADSR envelopes among the sources for an extensive modulation matrix.
• One insert effect per layer and two global send effects; each FX unit can load any of 41 algorithms including reverbs, delays, modulation effects, distortion and more.
• 128-voice polyphony.
• HQ oversampling playback mode.
• Disk-streaming sample playback with selectable buffer size.
• Loads wav files, sfz and proprietary WusikSND and DASHsnd format samples.

The difference between Prometheus X and its progenitor, Prometheus, lies in the included sample sets. The 900MB sfz samples that come with "X" are in addition to the larger sound set that comes with standard-Prometheus, meaning there are two ways to look at Prometheus X: 1)as a standalone product that comes with a 900 MB sound library, or 2) as a 900 MB sfz expansion to your extant Prometheus library. Pricing, it then, is different for each approach. The standalone version of Prometheus X is $60, but Dangerous Bear Underground is offering a library-only limited time upgrade price of $25 through November 17th, 2008.

Also of note: the developer's name "Dangerous Bear Underground" attracts quite the interesting array of content-targeted Google Ads.