Quote:
Originally Posted by Dunny
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.
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Yet this does not require that big amounts of memory because you could preload just the start of the samples (enough to cover the latency), loading what follows only for samples that are actually used.