UVI’s Toy Suite puts the sounds of '80s childhood playthings in your DAW

Music technology has a habit of making you feel like a big kid - studio gear is basically just a substitute for a toy collection, after all - but if you want to go back to the stuff you actually played with in your youth, UVI has just the thing.

Toy Suite is a massive sample library that contains what we’re guessing will be all the toy timbres you’ll ever need. The exhaustive content list includes tiny pianos, guitars, organs, drums, percussion, whistles, metallophones, bells, shakers, moo-cans, music boxes, drum machines, melodicas, accordions, harmonicas, trumpets, samplers, style-o-phones and talking toys.

Better still, there’s also a dual-layer 8-bit synth, offering sounds from the likes of the SID Station, Commodore 64, Game Boy and Mod Machine. As such, this is a collection that will appeal to nostalgic video gamers, too.

UVI says that, despite many of these toys being decidedly lo-fi, they were sampled using the same gear and techniques that the company has employed when capturing classical instruments. The 23.46GB collection includes 384 instruments, 1185 presets, 34 kits, 1499 loops and more than 70,000 samples.

Toy Suite is currently available for the introductory price of €279, rising to €399 after 10 September. It runs on PC and Mac in either UVI’s Falcon or the free UVI Workstation.

Find out more on the UVI website.