Next Yamaha Motif promises 512 megs of RAM

[Jake Johnson]

I don\'t know if this is off-topic or not--I thought it might be of interest to sample developers and owners, who\'ll be able to port reduced versions of their giga instruments to the next incarnation of the Motif when it\'s released in October:

512 megs of sampling RAM with a decent keybed, ADSR, filters, etc. Still not as much RAM as I\'d like, but that would be 512 one-meg piano notes. We should be able to do something with that, yes? (My fear is that it will take an hour to load this large a sample set into the keyboard, but once it\'s there, it will be available at the press of a button and portable.)

Maybe more importantly, this news demonstrates that Yamaha is acknowleding the need for a relatively large amount of RAM in its keyboards. Ideally, that means we can expect to have keyboards with a gig or more in the next year or two.

Unfortunately, this news also arrives as sample libraries are getting bigger and bigger, with Post and Vintaudio libraries coming on several cds. I wonder if Michiel and Franky, will develop reduced libraries for this Motif, or how many of us will start up our editors and see what samples we can shorten or interpolate to have a good piano in a keyboard.

[Jake Johnson]

(When I say port, I should add, I mean that owners of current sample libraries will have to load each sample in and map it to the keyboard--there may be some kind of editor that will make this possible to do on one\'s computer, and then add the entire thing to the Motif keyboard, but it will still be a chore. I guess developers can create a sample set that imports and maps automatically--I know that several developers already have small pianos that map this way to the current Motif.)

[Alan Russell]

Hi,

many of us MO-Bros including myself are quite disappointed that Yamaha has not provided a direct pathway for us Motif 8 owners to upgrade to a Motif 8 ES keyboard in September - October 2003.

It look to me as simple as a few chip switches in the same keyboard case. They are suggesting that we sell our present keyboards privately with extra warranties implied by Yamaha as a PR push.

Many of us are quite taken back by this.

Anyway. I will use my Motif 8 as my master keyboard with future Giga samples. Even with 512 megs of Ram of sounds, this is a composite of all of the sounds and not one. Giga Samples still blow the Motif 8 internal sounds off the planet IMHO and it will GET BETTER as time moves forward IMHO..

JMHO, others may differ..

Alan Russell

[Jake Johnson]

I agree---512 megs of memory is astonishingly limited these days. On the other hand, it\'s large in the world of keyboards. (And strange: in this upcoming Motif, Yamaha is letting users install standard DRAM, so they could have included a larger hard drive and more slots. They just chose to limit the machine to 512 megs, instead of reaching some limitation imposed by their sound engine. Absurd, really--if they\'d create a good keyboard with a 40 gig hard drive and room for 10-20 gigs of sampling RAM, the line would be very long to get this keyboard. On the other hand, maybe they just want to very slowly ramp up the memory of the keyboards, so they sell more with each increase in memory. (In another year, when sample libraries have gone into tetrabites, Yamaha will release a keyboard with a gig of memory?)

The Motif is clunky when working with samples? IN what way? Too many button-pushes\\steps to load and map them?

Unless the sample playing is very limited, I may consider one of the new Motifs on down the line, after it\'s released in October:
although it would take more time than I want to load and map the samples, it would be very nice to be able to boot up a keyboard and play a Vintaudio or Post piano, even if I had to remove some samples and interpolate the highest and lowest octaves. This keyboard has a sequencer, too. Tempting.