Firstly, if you want to so a lot of sampling on a PC, get a soundcard like
the AWE-32. If you add some additional RAM to it, you can do a lot of the
same stuff you could with an "real" sampler - like build your samples into
a patch for the AWE synth and play them back from a MIDI sequencer. I'd
avoid the AWE-64 at the moment as it's much harder to add RAM to - you can
use any old 30 pin SIMMS to expand the AWE-32, so it costs < 50 quid to add
8MB. Another great piece of cheap hardware is the Yahama DB-50XG, which
plugs onto a card like the AWE and gives you pretty amazing set of fully
programmable synth voices, especially for 130 quid.
Software:
For sampling, you can use a shareware package like Goldwave or CoolEdit.
CoolEdit can do stuff like time-stretching etc, which is pretty handy. The
_best_ PC sound editor by far is SoundForge 4.0, which does everything and
a bit besides. It is bloody expensive though - but features like the
"regions" facility are hard to beat.
Another amazingly useful toy when sampling is ReCycle. It lets you take a
sample like a drum loop, and cut it up into the individual beats. It can
then save the individual beat samples separately and creates a MIDI
sequence that will string them back together - so then you can rearrange
the loop any way you like. Junglists like this one a _lot_...
Finally, you need a sequencer. I use Cakewalk at the moment, which is by
far the easiest of the PC sequencers to get to grips with. I've played with
the others though, and if I was spending more of my own money on a
sequencer I'd get Cubase. What it has over Cakewalk is much better handling
of "patterns" within your work. For instance if you had a drum loop
sequence, you're likely to repeat it a lot. In Cubase you can make each
repeat be a "ghost" of the first loop, so if you edit the first one all of
the others will change to match. Cakewalk can't do this, as far as I can
tell (took me 30 seconds to work it out in Cubase.) Cubase also lets you
treat a set of patterns as a group, which is very handy. Logic takes the
whole patterns thing far further, but is burdened with the worlds worst
user interface (utterly incomprehensible.)
So, that's my $0.02...
..Mark..