[Linuxsampler-devel] Re: Suupporting various sample library formats and engines

[Paul K. <pau...@ma...>]

I'm going through today's digest, so this includes several people's
replies...


Steve Harris <S.W...@ec...> wrote:
>
> > We should be able to stream DLS in and out of the engine as well.
> 
> I dont get the impression that DLS is anywhere near rich enough to 
> do this job, it would need to be something pretty expressive.
> 
> Gigasampler uses DLS 2 + proprietary extensions, doesn't it?

Phil Kerr <phi...@el...> wrote:
> 
> It's a question of balance between using a widely used standard with 
> some limitations over a custom format which may not fully interoperate.


The nice thing about DLS 2 is it's *designed* to have proprietary 
extensions added, but other applications should be able to ignore the 
parts they don't understand and still get at the keymapping and maybe
the envelopes and other simple stuff. 




Benno Senoner <be...@ga...> wrote:
> 
> regarding the AKAI samples: Steve says akai samplers were quite limited
> in terms or RAM availabilty (32-64MB) and since akai samplers allow some
> funny stuff like modulating the loop points I was wondering what you 
> thing about not using disk streaming for this format.
> How about the s5000/6000 series ? what is the maximum RAM configuration
> ? Do they allow nasty loop point modulation too ?

I don't think Akai ever had loop point modulation?  Except while editing
samples, anyway.

S5000/S6000 is I think 128 or 256MB max RAM, but they do have disk 
streaming. Don't think they have loop point modulation but I've not used
one.



> And since we speak about looping  I was wondering how looping is handled
> in most hardware and software samplers:
> 
> do most of them use loop-until-release (eg looping part is looped and
> after release the sample gets played as it was not looped)

Most samplers give an option of loop until release or infinite looping.
Akai have (depending on model) up to 8 loops per sample, each with a
different number of repeats, but nobody ever used more than 2 loops...


> When implementing these kind of looping techniques in a disk streaming
> sampler, the first looping technique requires caching a region (let's
> say 64k samples)
> past the final loop point in order to give the engine the time to refill
> the ring buffers from disk. This means the memory consumption almost
> doubles
> for looped samples over oneshot samples. With very large sample
> libraries this could mean that RAM can become scarce. (but I am not sure
> if large
> libraries of looped samples exist).

I expect there are some libraries that are big and looped (e.g. sustained
string sections) as the sound designers like to push the boundaries of what
can be acheived.




Paul.

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