[Gorf]

Originally Posted by Dunny

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.

you have a limited number of keyboards with a limited number of keys.
The maximum a single person can handle is probably a arrangement similar to big pipe organ in a church with all the panels and registers.

So yes, you do know what limited options of samples are needed.
You are not going to evaluate different microphone settings of your samples in a live performance - these are things you chose upfront.

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.

sure you need to have some higher (virtual) sample-rate while calculating the mix - but upscaling should be part of your algorithm. Doubling the value-range to 32bit makes sense - also doubling the rate to 88.2 might be useful - anything more is useless, since all aliasing errors than still left can not influence your hearing experience.

But again: you only need to do that within your calculation, but there is no need to store the instruments in this "quality" since it is only intermediate redundant information.

It all adds up, I'm afraid, and HDDs (even SSDs) are not yet fast enough.

with your approach they aren't of course!
first you blow up your data by a factor of >8 without adding information and than you complain about the transfer speed...