# External Samples

Whilst the built-in samples can get you up and started quickly, you might wish to experiment with other recorded sounds in your music. Sonic Pi totally supports this. First though, let’s have a quick discussion on the portability of your piece.

## Portability

When you compose your piece purely with built-in synths and samples, the code is all you need to faithfully reproduce your music. Think about that for a moment - that’s amazing! A simple piece of text you can email around or stick in a Gist represents everything you need to reproduce your sounds. That makes it really easy to share with your friends as they just need to get hold of the code.

However, if you start using your own pre-recorded samples, you lose this portability. This is because to reproduce your music other people not only need your code, they need your samples too. This limits the ability for others to manipulate, mash-up and experiment with your work. Of course this shouldn’t stop you from using your own samples, it’s just something to consider.

## Local Samples

So how do you play any arbitrary WAV, AIFF or FLAC file on your computer? All you need to do is pass the path of that file to `sample`:

    # Raspberry Pi, Mac, Linux
    sample "/Users/sam/Desktop/my-sound.wav"
    # Windows
    sample "C:/Users/sam/Desktop/my-sound.wav"

Sonic Pi will automatically load and play the sample. You can also pass all the standard params you’re used to passing `sample`:

    # Raspberry Pi, Mac, Linux
    sample "/Users/sam/Desktop/my-sound.wav", rate: 0.5, amp: 0.3
    # Windows
    sample "C:/Users/sam/Desktop/my-sound.wav", rate: 0.5, amp: 0.3