Quote:
Originally Posted by Gorf
While I am not against more than 2 or 4 GB and can see the benefit of a larger address-space for some (rare) applications, your example does not convince me.
I still do not understand why one would hold multi-gigabytes of instrument-samples in RAM - especially in a highly redundant resolution.
you mentioned some latency related reasons, but that makes still no sense to me at all, since we are in the digital realm:
a higher sampling rate means just more data that needs to be processed. More data representing the same period of time. That means higher demand of RAM, bandwidths and processing power. How can this possibly reduce latency?
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Imagine you have a track made of around 20 or thirty sampled instruments. Each one has a sample per note (127 of those), one per velocity per note (so each of those 127 notes has 127 samples) and each of those velocities was recorded with 12 or 16 microphones, each having their own spacial properties. That's a pretty extreme example - most instruments have only 30 velocities and are recorded with only three or four mics - but we have to allow for it.
Now for playback of such a track you could render the whole thing to a WAV file (we allow for this) but it takes minutes to do, and making adjustments involves going back to individual samples, so to make things flow a little easier, we keep the lot in memory where necessary. That means that there may be a slight delay when loading in samples that haven't been used yet, but that's fine for editing.
Where it's absolutely
not fine is in a live performance. In that situation we cannot tell ahead of time which samples will be needed and we certainly cannot allow any time at all to pull samples off a disk. We need the whole lot in memory.
Then there's effect mixing, which if done on 44.1khz 16bit sound samples quickly gathers aliasing errors so to minimise that we use 192khz 32bit float samples.
It all adds up, I'm afraid, and HDDs (even SSDs) are not yet fast enough.