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

[Frank N. <bea...@we...>]

Hi,
Benno wrote:

[...]
> Steve as suspected there are people that agree with me that when loading
> AKAI samples
> in RAM you can easily end up burning 256MB of RAM which is a lot for not
> high-end PCs.
> Let's see how the discussion evolves ...  AKAI experts your saying ?

First of all, hi :-). I joined the list last week but only lurked so far (and I
am not sure if I'll able to contribute a lot to this project, but..oh well).

Second, I am no AKAI expert, but at least I have an S2000 with 32 MB RAM
at home (so I should be able to give some informations about how "the real
thing" is done) and I also got a couple of sampling CDs for it.
My main interest is to be able to use that beast in my MIDI setup at home,
and that's what a small hobby project I pursue for quite a while now is 
focussed at (no comments here; I need to be able to release something first :).

What I can add to this discussion right now is that of the sampling CDs
I have here, most instrument sets are rather small; the largest I have
don't even fill the 32MB RAM of the sampler; though, there are certainly
much larger sampling collections out there.

But when I had the opportunity to play a little with a Windows-based music
system recently (using a Creamware Pulsar Scope board and Cubase) and checked
out the software sampler modules that come with the Scope, I found that it
typically expected sample sets no larger than 100 MB (I believe that was the
fixed upper bound). All sampling CDs I could use there were also much smaller
(per "instrument") than 32 MB. However, by creating several layers you could
easily multiply the memory requirements by 2, 3 or 4.

Frank

PS: I recently found a nice sample resource@AKAI:
ftp://ftp.akaipro.co.jp/pub/downloads
They have a couple of soundsets for MPC2000XL and S5000/S6000. The few
sets I managed to download so far sounded quite good (most even in stereo).
There is one especially interesting piece which is a 190 MB zip archive of
a stereo piano..sounds like a good test candidate :-). I was happy to see
that Paul Kellett's AKAI file format information page should fully suffice
to be able to parse the program file (*.AKP).