On 06 Apr 2006, at 12:38 PM, David W. Fenton wrote:
From my point of view, a soundfont and a sample are the same thing -- you're taking a synthesizer and loading a selection of sounds into it, rather than being stuck with the ones it came with. This can be done either in software or in hardware. If it were done in hardware, it would make the system much more efficient. If GPO's instruments could be offloaded to a separate DSP on a soundcard, you'd not have the awful problems that occur with loading up too many of them at a time.
The Core Duo processors found in the new Macs are more than adequate to play back large numbers of GPO samples simultaneously.
The only problem with GPO is that the demands of the software were ahead of the hardware most people own. But if you're talking about a new Intel Core Duo at 1.8-2 GHz, that's a massive improvement over a similarly clocked G4 or G5. A 2.0 GHz MacBook Pro with 2 GB of RAM would run GPO like a champ in either Windows or (once a Universal version is released) Mac OS X.
Whether you like it or not, hardware-based sounds are a complete anachronism. One of the many reasons they are vastly inferior to software-based samples is that you're stuck with the hardware samples and can never upgrade them, whereas upgrading your software samples is as easy as buying a new library. And there are simply no hardware- based soundcards that offer anything like the quality and flexibility you get with GPO or Garritan JABB.
- Darcy ----- [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://secretsociety.typepad.com Brooklyn, NY _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
