On 6 Apr 2006 at 12:49, Darcy James Argue wrote: > 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.
No, no, no. That is not the kind of hardware-based sound I'm talking about. If a soundcard has a DSP at its heart it can take over processing. If it has built-in RAM, the samples being played by the DSP can be loaded into that RAM, instead of into the main system RAM. That would offload both the RAM and the processing to a separate device, and leave the system RAM and processor available for all the other tasks it has to accomplish. You'd initialize the soundcard by loading the samples, then send it the MIDI data. The only difference between this and the traditional soundcard with samples stored in ROM is that this kind of soundcard isn't limited to the samples stored in its ROM. And Creative and Turtle Beach were selling that kind of sound card nearly 10 years ago. -- David W. Fenton http://dfenton.com David Fenton Associates http://dfenton.com/DFA/ _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
