1010music’s Tangerine is a charmingly orange and ridiculously tiny sampler

1010music’s colorful and portable Nanobox line just gave birth to a brand-new sampler, the Tangerine. This may be an ultra-portable device, but it boasts powerful sampling features, alongside a pleasingly bright orange colorway. The Tangerine can trigger one shots, play time-synced loops and record live loops, among other tasks.

The maximum sample size is 4GB, so when we say “trigger one shots” we really mean you can trigger multi-sample pieces that act as a backbone to a beat or melodic composition, in addition to simple snare hits and the like. This being a modern device, you can also slice up clips and resample playback. There’s also “musically intelligent” looping that should keep everything in time without any obvious air-filled gaps.

As for the hardware itself, you get a touchscreen interface for making adjustments and a 32GB microSD card slot for storage, though there’s a small amount (64MB) of internal storage. The Tangerine connects to other instruments via MIDI for capturing additional samples, which is always nice.

Each file boasts a 4GB storage cap, which the company says is enough for up to four hours of continuous streaming. There’s a 500 multi-sample bank limit and a total wav capacity of 1,500. You can save multi-sample banks to nearly 80 presets for later use, complete with 16 velocity layers and eight stereo sample pads. There are plenty of adjustment options to change up the sound of these presets via pitch, gain, filters, quantization and more. MIDI-mapped parameter controls also transfer over, so you can fiddle with those for even more sonic diversity. This is a real-deal sampler that approaches groovebox territory. Not bad for a ridiculously tiny device that 1010music calls “nearly indestructible.”

There’s one caveat, and it’s the same one that accompanies other Nanobox devices, like the impressively powerful Lemondrop and Fireball synthesizers. Despite weighing just 0.25 pounds and shipping with a pocket-friendly form factor, the Tangerine sampler is not battery-powered and must be plugged in via USB-C to function. For true portability, you’d need an external power bank.

1010music’s Tangerine sampler is available now and costs $400. In addition to the device, you also get a USB-C cable, the aforementioned microSD card and a type B TRS MIDI to MIDI 5-pin DIN adapter.

Update 10/23/2023 10:10 AM ET: Granular processing was incorrectly listed as a feature of the Tangerine on the 1010music. The product listing has since been corrected and we've updated the article accordingly.