Agh! A sample is a sound is a piece of a sound is the smallest little bugger bit of a sound. What IS a sample? All of them? Do people usually add something to differentiate between them all? Or have I just gone mad? 
whatever you sample with a sampler, ends up being a sample.
hope this helps. 
Keith: don’t use a technical term to describe a technical term to the technicly termless. 
Won’t help…
Tekno: A sample, in the music software way of thinking is a piece of sound stored in a streaming format, like waw for example. Or mp3. It can be small, it can be big, but what defines it is that it’s not a musical composition in its own right, it may be USED as a PART of a musical composition.
What makes this definition difficult again is sampling of other songs; like Eminem’s Stan for instance. Where he took a snippet of a song made by Dido, and made it a wholesomely recognizable part of his own composition.
This type of “sampling” is what people refer to as an “exeption” of the before mentioned example.
Hope this helps. 
Thanks for the info… although, maybe I exaggerated my n00biness… [and picked the wrong forum]
I know what a sample is, quite generally - a chunk of sound. But I recall (as in “believe I read somewhere”) hearing that a waveform is not really measured in hz, but in samples. ie, a sample-rate of 44100 hz makes 44100 samples in a second. What I meant with the topic and my question – that might have been a bit misleading, which I am sorry for; I felt quite goofy when I wrote it – is how to separate the two terms: Sample as in “chunk of audio” versus Sample as a measuring unit, or definition on the molecular level.
Various people use various terms for the same thing. Sample, Waveform, sound, wave… To confuse me further, people sometimes decide to say things like, “take a sample out of the waveform and blah blah”… a what sample? Do they mean a piece/sip/range/sample of the full waveform, the whole thing, or the smallest piece possible from anywhere within it…
I guess that what I am after, in essence, is a technically correct way to describe a full sound, a snippet of a sound, and the smallest piece. Because right now I’m mixing it all up…
To have different words for the two meanings, you can use “frame” instead
of “sample” like: A framerate of 44100 Hz makes 44100 frames in a second.
ok, wasn’t sure if teknocide was serious about himself asking that question, hence my pretty dull post above.
but i think that the term “sample” is one of those words, which is heavily depending on the context which it is used in.
it actually can have multiple of different meanings but generally when talking about “samples” among musicians, i’d always consider it to be that what is known as a sampled (<-- there it goes again…) waveform, saved as a file to be used in electronic music compositions.
or to put it in other words, sample = a digital recording of acoustic noise.
That’s it. No more Renoise-board tonight.
There are 44100 samples in one second with a samplerate of 44100 Hz.
(Hz = 1 / second, or “per second”)
What Bantai speaks about may very well be correct in some context,
but this has nothing to do with Renoise.
lol!!! 