Too few RAM!

[Trevelyan]

Hi,
when I bought GigaStudio 96 in combination (bundled) with Advanced Orchestra, I thought my PIII/500 System with 128 MB RAM would be sufficient.
Now I have to find out that this amount of memory is far from being enough for classical music composing: You can load the basic samples for a string quartet or woodwind quintet, but impossibly a full orchestra! I managed to load Violin, Viola, and Cello Section basic - and that\'s it (if you try to load more, GigaSampler crashes).
Do I really have to buy 1 GIG of RAM or so for lots of money, or is there a trick...?
Hope someone can help me,
Marcus

[Terry]

I had the same problem and I upgraded to 256 meg ram. It works great with AO. You can\'t quite get a full orchestra but you can get almost everything. By the way, the strings take up the most meg by far.

Terry

[Trevelyan]

Thanks!

-- not quite a full orchestra... well, that\'s what I believed when listening to the examples published by BestService...
so I think I\'ve to do without a Wagnerian orchestral sound (too sad) - at least I\'ll stock up on memory a bit.

[LHong]

I think Terry is right, 256Mb-DRAM is the good size to start. Not only GIGA, your MIDI-Audio-SEQ would be happy too.
LHong

[Chadwick]

This really ticks me off.
I can\'t believe you need more than 256mb ram to pull off a full orchestral piece and nobody has mentioned it on this forum yet.
Are you guys sure?
Is it possible you\'re using string patches which have many layers of samples on the same key - thus using more ram, even though you don\'t necessarily utilise the samples?
It suck that there isn\'t some standard page at the Nemesys site that says something to the effect that:
If you buy X+Y+Z hardware, you will be able to play 160 voices with Instruments like A, B or C.
Yes I know you can\'t allow for every possible configuration, but lots of people visiting this forum just want to dedicate a PC to Gigastudio, or maybe Giga and one of the top 3 sequencers - that\'s not a lot of different configurations to test.
I\'m sure if someone from Nemesys had told me exactly what hardware to buy, I would have bought it happily and had a lot fewer sleepless nights.

[mitchb2]

Trevelyan,

Yes, you\'re right. 128MB doesn\'t allow much.
I can load VI, VA, and Celli, but if I load Contrabass (bringing the total up to 84% memory usage), my system chokes.

On the bright side, memory prices are coming back down...$147 for 128MB. I\'ll probably add it as soon as I get some verification that the bugs in Gigastudio will be fixed.

[Trevelyan]

Yes Chadwick, I think they\'re telling the truth...
It could depend on the kind of samples you use - Siedlaczek obviously is very memory-consuming. In the Advanced Orchestra booklet, they say: “…the RAM of your computer limits the number of samples Gigasampler can load at once, e.g. 256 mb allow 2500 mono or 1250 stereo samples”. The violin section alone, for example, contains 427 stereo samples (you can reduce this number a bit by loading only the part of samples you really need, e.g. phrases) - you see how fast you’ll reach your limits.
Maybe Nemesys doesn’t consider it necessary to point out that you won’t have much fun with AO with too few RAM on your system, since it isn’t one of their own products, but I would also consider it fair, if they would present a few example configurations on their site, since GigaStudio alone isn’t of much use…
Chamber music is also a nice thing, but I wonder why I need a five CD set full of orchestra samples for this purpose.

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size=\"1\" face=\"Verdana, Arial\">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Chadwick:
This really ticks me off.
I can\'t believe you need more than 256mb ram to pull off a full orchestral piece and nobody has mentioned it on this forum yet.
Are you guys sure?
Is it possible you\'re using string patches which have many layers of samples on the same key - thus using more ram, even though you don\'t necessarily utilise the samples?
It suck that there isn\'t some standard page at the Nemesys site that says something to the effect that:
If you buy X+Y+Z hardware, you will be able to play 160 voices with Instruments like A, B or C.
Yes I know you can\'t allow for every possible configuration, but lots of people visiting this forum just want to dedicate a PC to Gigastudio, or maybe Giga and one of the top 3 sequencers - that\'s not a lot of different configurations to test.
I\'m sure if someone from Nemesys had told me exactly what hardware to buy, I would have bought it happily and had a lot fewer sleepless nights.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

[Bill]

> I can\'t believe you need more than 256mb ram to pull off a full orchestral
> piece and nobody has mentioned it on this forum yet.

Well, it depends on how long you’ve been around. The subject has certainly come up before.

Nemesys has always had a guide in their FAQ as to how much memory is needed to load samples. If you are using AO instruments that have unneeded articulation, you can save variations of those instruments (without those articulations) to save memory.

In any case, you can record an orchestral piece in several passes. If the piece includes Piano, you’ll likely run out of polyphony anyway.

[aspenleaf]

Yes, you do need much more than 128 MB to load the full AO set. You may want to do what I\'m doing until I can afford more RAM. I made very limited gigs from the basic gigs, because I found that for the composition phase of the project, I could get by with a sustain f and a detach or staccato for each instrument. When it comes time to start producing the piece, I take each section and load the full basic gig for each element of that section, and make the necessary changes in the articulations to get the result I\'m after. Then I run that down to a stereo submix for that particular section. (You can always remix if needed.) It\'s a bit inconvenient, but it works. By the way, I emailed Nemesys about system requirements for Gigastudio and got a reply from Dave the same day. He recommended an 800Mhz processor and at least 256MB RAM. Also, a SCSI HD for full functionality.

[This message has been edited by aspenleaf (edited 07-05-2000).]

[Laurence]

I have a gig of RAM and it is the way to go. I am always running GS, Cakewalk and C-Console together, and often I am running XGEdit and ANXEdit as well. When I record audio tracks I often edit them with Wavelab while everything else is running. You can Never have too much RAM. Why do I have a gig of RAM? Because that\'s all my motherboard will take!

[Kenn159]

Just wondering how much a gig of ram cost you?

[Trevelyan]

It cost him a LOT, I assume... personally, I can\'t/won\'t afford it at the moment, especially not just for a hobby. I ordered 256 megs RAM, which cost 730 DM, that\'s about 349 US$...

[LHong]

Don\'t tell me about 2,000 USD, just for 1GB/133Mhz-DRAM!
LHong

[Chadwick]

Ha!
I still remember paying $1000 US for 16mb of ram when the Roland S770 sampler came out!
Felt like I was paying in blood.
Mind you, that \'maxed\' out the memory (sheesh..)

[Kenn159]

Yeah that\'s alot of money,but I can top that. back in 1989 I payed $1,200 for 3rd party memory ,to upgrade my Akai s1000 from it\'s stock 2 megs of memory to 8 megs. And I bought it for 10 percent over cost because I new the dealer . I thought I was getting a good deal because the same amount of memory through Akai was over $2,000.
If you think thats bad I new someone that had a Synclavier and he payed $25,000 to upgrade it to 40 megs,back in the mid 80,s.

The only problem I have with spending alot for memory is ,my Pentium 3 450 is already considered not powerfull enough for gigastudio, to pour more money in it seems like a waste of money .especially because my computer take pc100 mem and they have computers capable of running pc133 and pc200 memory.