Streaming Full Samples from a Ram Disk

[sfsmith]

Is it possible to configure a large ram disk from within Windows, and then load all the samples of a particular sound, say GIGAPIANO, into ram, and configure Gigastudio to stream the samples from the ram disk? Thanks. Steve images/icons/smile.gif

[pendragon]

Why on earth a someone wanna do that?

[sfsmith]

Then it wouldn\'t matter what the access time of the disk is. The samples I know I want to use would already be in ram. Ram response time is faster than the 8 ms it takes for the disk to respond. Also, the HD could be powered down.

[Doug Marshall]

Has anyone tried it? Would Giga have potential problems with its quicksound database?

[pendragon]

Nice but forget about it, Winblows is horrible with it\'s memory management plus the CPU gets kicked in the butt also.

You could buy a Mac, ramdisks are far better organized with that machines images/icons/wink.gif Hell, you can even put your entire OS on a ramdisk with a Mac.

[marcuspocus]

Yeah, well PC also can do that.. And btw, giga doesn\'t run on MAC images/icons/smile.gif

[sfsmith]

Well and fine. If a PC can do it, please let me know how, as I am looking for a solution. The MASTER of ram disks was the old ATARI 1040 which had a ram disk which wouldn\'t crash when the rest of the computer did, thus allowing you to do what what called a \"warm boot\". The computer would reboot with the contents of the ram protected.

[midphase]

Use Kontakt or Unity on a new Mac with 2 gigs of RAM, you can easily load up the entire gigapiano in RAM and get supremely great response with tons of polyphony and very low latency!

Both the programs can read gigasampler files!

[Simon Ravn]

sfsmith: hey, Amiga could do that too!! images/icons/smile.gif

[Alberto R.S.]

An interesting subject: I never tried that but could work. You can use any ram-disk specific application to create one virtual disk unit out of 1Gb Ram (let\'s say), then open Gigastudio and load the Gigapiano from the .GIG file located into the Ram-disk. That should work with no problems. The question is: will it be convenient to do so? Being not a dangerous operation I suggest you to give it a try. Consider that this trick (if working) will be useful only in certain situation, for example: you need a computer to load just the gigapiano and act as a piano module but the computer does not have fast streaming hard drives.
Best luck,
Alberto

[sfsmith]

I\'ve just heard that the GIGASAMPLER application uses whatever ram is available to store/cache the samples that have been requested. Is this true? If so, then I see no point in using a ram disk.

If it\'s possible to tell GIGASTUDIO to load the entire samles into RAM, rather than just the first second of the sample, then there\'s another reason the RAM disk may not be required.

I also heard that there is NO POINT in having more than half a gig of ram, because WINDOWS doesn\'t recognize any more than that. Is this true?

[Alberto R.S.]

I know that both GIGAsampler and GIGAstudio store the first 64kb of each sample into RAM and then stream the remaining part from the hard drive when the samples are \"called into action\".

At the moment it is not possible to tell GIGA to store more/less than 64kb in RAM.

The RAM limit is 1Gb. If you use Win9x the limit exists because of the operating system, that is unable to use more of it. If you use WinXP or 2K the limit exists because of GIGA itself, which seems to handle memory just as it did in WIin9x. Don\'t bother purchasing more than 1Gb RAM, you may have more problems than benefits.

[sfsmith]

Thanks images/icons/smile.gif OK. I get a PC with 1 gig of RAM max. How much ram is available for samples after Gigastudio and Windows both grab their share? I guess the earlier the version of Windows, but better?