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1/4th gig RAM in a 2011 flagship $3000 workstation. REALLY??
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nowtime
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Joined: 27 Aug 2009
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PostPosted: Mon Feb 21, 2011 3:30 am    Post subject: 1/4th gig RAM in a 2011 flagship $3000 workstation. REALLY?? Reply with quote

I know it's been mentioned, but it would be nice if Korg knew what their customer base thought of this.

I've been wanting a GREAT sampler ever since I had the pleasure of owning a meager Emu ESI-32. Plug in a (zip!) drive, and have access to unlimted great presets, made by myself or made commercially. Korg knows about samplers. To include sampling in the Kronos and then offer 200 some-odd MB of RAM is ridiculous, methinks. It would be nice if Korg put some more thought into this. Samplers are powerful and very musical and very fun instruments. Step it up please!


Last edited by nowtime on Mon Feb 21, 2011 4:18 am; edited 1 time in total
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jemkeys25
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PostPosted: Mon Feb 21, 2011 4:03 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

korg said there's 1GB of sample ram
i believe.
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MartinHines
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Joined: 21 Jan 2003
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PostPosted: Mon Feb 21, 2011 4:13 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

There is 270MB (somewhere around there) of RAM available if you have all of the expansion libraries loaded. If not, there is 1 GB available.
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EvilDragon
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Joined: 24 Nov 2005
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Location: Croatia

PostPosted: Mon Feb 21, 2011 8:32 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

What MartinHines said. You can decide what samples you want to be preloaded on power on - it can be all or none at all, your choice.


There also might be a prospect of upgrading the RAM to 4 GB, which gives you up to 3 GB of sample RAM (1 GB is used for OS and "ROM" samples). But, Korg didn't confirm any of this yet.

And you have almost 12 GB of raw sample data in the machine itself. Isn't that a LOT compared to any other vendor? Yes, it is. So...
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jahrome
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PostPosted: Mon Feb 21, 2011 8:53 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

12 GB of sample data is great. But having 2 GBs (or more) of your own sample data like the Motif XF is also great.
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mkpcola



Joined: 21 Feb 2011
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PostPosted: Mon Feb 21, 2011 7:01 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Please....
Yammy MotifXF does not have 2Gb sampling RAM. It has 128Mb RAM and it is not expandable at this point. It can give you 2Gb of special flash ROM to store wave forms if you buy $$$ flash ROM modules from Yamaha.

You can not load 256Mb samples to memory. You have to load 128Mb at a time to memory, edit them and write them to your expensive Flash ROM little by little. OR you can buy large wave forms data from Yamaha, hook up your computer and load them to flash ROM.$$$
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mrk
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PostPosted: Mon Feb 21, 2011 8:40 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Then just use the older XS - get 2GB for $60 and there you go. Wink
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nowtime
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Joined: 27 Aug 2009
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PostPosted: Mon Feb 21, 2011 11:08 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Well, this might explain why Korg (or anyone else for that matter) puts very limited thought and RAM into their samplers. No one cares!! 360+ views on this thread and not an overwhelming agreement with me by any stretch of the imagination. We are nickle and diming about megabytes, for the most part.

Oh well, death to professional samplers, long live minimalism and making do with what you're given, as far as samplers go. Que Sera.
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Rob Sherratt
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PostPosted: Mon Feb 21, 2011 11:27 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Sorry, I can't read this thread and keep my mouth shut.

It is just that you must not make any conclusion that lack of adequate RAM means the death of samplers. Quite the opposite. Let's do away with RAM limitations completely and instead develop technology in which very fast DMA controllers are used to stream samples direct from disk to the D-A converters, via a small dynamic buffer, when the sounds are needed. Any engineer can do the math and see that the performance of Hard Disks is more than up to the job.

Well, the technology has been developed already, but not by Korg. I am sorry if this comes across as advertising, but the suggestion was given freely by me and others to Korg three years ago of how to make this work, and they ignored it. The only two companies I know who offer musical instruments whose sounds are buffered from disk in real time are Muse Research (Receptor) and ourselves (Groove X series).

Is this viable? Does it work? Yes. We have combis and arrangements driving ten different VSTi and sampling synthesisers simultaneously, and the average note on latency is less than 5ms. The total polyphony exceeds 300 notes. We will demonstrate this for all to see at Musikmesse.
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sani
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PostPosted: Mon Feb 21, 2011 11:32 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

That's very interesting to hear!
A couple of questions.
Does it allow for more than 10 instruments? It should do at least 16!
What means average latency of 5 ms? Is this a maximum or can it be even greater (not so good).
And finally, how about seamless switching?
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mkpcola



Joined: 21 Feb 2011
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PostPosted: Mon Feb 21, 2011 11:38 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

well...
I just wondering what you gonna do with one Gb of sample RAM?
Jammed your machine with all those samples you don't really know and do what? You better get sample players(DJ equipment) instead of a synthesizer.
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SpIdErWeB
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Joined: 24 Sep 2005
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PostPosted: Mon Feb 21, 2011 11:47 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Rob Sherratt wrote:
Well, the technology has been developed already, but not by Korg.


Hmm... The Korg Kronos do include Disk Streaming from the internal SSD. So, Korg did developed a way to streaming samples from disk to convertor. The same way with Gigastudio, Kontakt or any other Disk-Streaming capable Player on a neKo or any DAW.

Of course, Korg don't (yet) support streaming for custom samples, but it's just a matter of time, the same way we could also see some possible 4Gb RAM upgrade...

So, I'm really not worry at all about the Sampler possibility... Actually, as already mentioned, we can still unload the EXs and have 1Gb of free RAM for the sampler only... where the Motif XF only has 128 Mb.

Phil
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Rob Sherratt
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PostPosted: Tue Feb 22, 2011 12:03 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

sani wrote:
That's very interesting to hear!
A couple of questions.
Does it allow for more than 10 instruments? It should do at least 16!
What means average latency of 5 ms? Is this a maximum or can it be even greater (not so good).
And finally, how about seamless switching?


If one of the synth engines is the Gigasampler then you can have 16 different instruments playing on that, while at the same time if another synth engine is the B4 organ then you can have 16 different organ patches playing on that, while at the same time if another synth engine is the GM/GS synth you can have 16 different Rolly good instruments playing on that, while at the same time if another synth engine is the XG/XS synth you can have 16 different Yummie instruments playing on that. And so on including VSTis you load yourself like any from The Native Instruments range. In total you can have ten synth engines each playing 16 different instruments, 160 part multi timbral. Each synth engine has it's own virtual screen, you switch between screens in a few milliseconds by pressing a button on the front panel. You could use up to three display monitors simultaneously. You could use up to ten keyboards simultaneously with ten different musicians all playing their own synth engine at the same time.
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Rob Sherratt
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PostPosted: Tue Feb 22, 2011 12:18 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Quote:
Hmm... The Korg Kronos do include Disk Streaming from the internal SSD. So, Korg did developed a way to streaming samples from disk to convertor. The same way with Gigastudio, Kontakt or any other Disk-Streaming capable Player on a neKo or any DAW


Sorry but I can't agree this comparison at least not based on the operation of my M3 and Pa2x. The data from SSD is streamed into sample RAM in its entirety before samples can play back. If the sample is not in RAM and there is a patch change request requiring a sample that is still in SSD then there is a long delay while it is retrieved in entirety before it can be played back. And if the available sample RAM is full, then tough luck loading any more samples.

Conversely, Gigastudio, Kontakt etc fetch samples for playback from HD as and when they are needed and they start playing as soon as the first few bytes are in the playback buffer. A patch change Request results in a new sample being fetched from HD but it plays immediately after the seek-to-sector operation finds the start of the sample. A critical issue is the OS switching latency which on Windoze is no better than 20ms, hence we do not use Windoze. With real time Linux we get note on latencies of 5ms or better even when the system is fully loaded.

Maybe some major architectural change has happened in the Kronos? But with an ARMless processor I doubt it.
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sani
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PostPosted: Tue Feb 22, 2011 12:20 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Thanks for the clarification. Sounds really impressive.
You just omitted the question about seamless switching. Not a deal breaker necessarily but still highly important to a lot of live players.
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