Disk streaming - on or off?

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Just been reading the Cakewalk 64 bit white paper and came across this:
With current technological limitations, samplers introduce an interesting wrinkle. Many samplers employ some form of disk streaming technology to work around today's RAM limitations. However, it is difficult if not impossible to fetch data from the disk "just in time" when a user starts playing a note. It's a solvable problem, but the technology that is required to combine instant note-on latency with disk streaming has patent protection (by Tascam, for Gigasampler). An attempt to not accidentally infringe on the patent or a desire to avoid paying licensing fees results in few soft-sampler vendors that actually use disk streaming in its most efficient form.
Since I use Kontakt and Logic's sampler and assuming they both use this "less efficient" method (is this correct?) would I be better off turning off disk streaming? After all I have 2 gigs of DDR2 RAM and don't plan on using enormous samples (the Malmsjo grand is my biggest) so would I get better performance without it?

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I've only had a little think about it but running from RAM -- if you have enough -- can't be less efficient than running from disk.

Obviously, if you've "only just" enough, you may discover it's not really enough ;-).

"Enough" means you're not slowing down processing of other tasks by using up all the RAM. You also need to worry about using Swap space rather than RAM, of course - perhaps turn off swap entirely. (Again, if you've got enough RAM.)

Thanks for posting that, though, it does help clarify René's position over sfz.
Last edited by pljones on Fri Feb 11, 2005 6:02 pm, edited 3 times in total.

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aMUSEd wrote: Since I use Kontakt and Logic's sampler and assuming they both use this "less efficient" method (is this correct?) would I be better off turning off disk streaming? After all I have 2 gigs of DDR2 RAM and don't plan on using enormous samples (the Malmsjo grand is my biggest) so would I get better performance without it?
You will always get better performance without disk streaming, if you have the RAM, so yes...
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pljones wrote: Thanks for posting that, though, it does help clarify René's position over sfz.
What's that then?

I have the free version - which mode is best for that? (I assume 32bit but not streaming)

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Interesting . . .

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aMUSEd wrote:What's that then?
René won't add streaming support for sfz format mapped samples.

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pljones wrote:
aMUSEd wrote:What's that then?
René won't add streaming support for sfz format mapped samples.
…and since he's now aligned with Cakewalk it all seems to be for good reason: if you want to use massive samples in sfz then it'll soon be possible (provided you can afford that required amount of RAM! :wink:) But at least the possiblity will exist…

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That's probably true, but GS3 apparently is more of a downgrade than anything else. Everyone who I've talked to that uses it in a professional setting, most of them being previous GS2.5 (and earlier) users, say that it's HORRIBLY buggy, causes massive system errors + crashes, and is wildly CPU inefficient.

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GS3 apparently is more of a downgrade than anything else.
Completely expected. I think I hit this one on the nail: http://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic ... highlight=

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