@Christian Marcussen said:
Did you watch the Ram management video?
From that I gather that you can indeed benefit greatly from it. Lets say you have a violin performance. Once you have nailed it like you want it you tell the program to discard all unused samples. This will reduce the amount of samples loaded into your ram dramaticly. Now with all the extra space you could a new instrument, and do that trick again once you have nailed th passage.
Yes I did watch the RAM Save video... it was like deja vu and reading the Halion manual all over again [[[[;)]]]]
But seriously, I don't like the approach particularly; it find it very clumsy...
A better approach would be to automatically detect this under the covers and never expose this?
I don't want to unload half my instrument manually, or even have to think when would be a good time to consider doing that! I don't want to unload them, then copy and paste a new part and not notice the missing notes... it is all too much of a pain... why can't the VSTi automatically detect the unused samples (say - by timestamping each sample) and unload them after a period? It has more knowledge than I do... it is a computer! Then, if I use them again, lazily load them in the moment the midi note arrives? This is EASY to implement... as an IT architect and developer, I'll show you how [[[[;)]]]]
My choice on the matter would be if the VST didn't load any samples AT ALL when I loaded my patch and had the option to just pull the notes from disk rather than memory, with the obvious and expected latency (which I could live with for the sake of the massive upside of flexibility especially since I always notate my compositions using the mouse).
I write this sort of lazy loading code all the time in my day job so know it is easily possible.
Exposing this sort of performance tuning into the user interface is clumsy and error prone. I'm always having a go at developers for doing this. I don't give the guy at the shop instructions for how to best find the washing machine I am after in the warehouse... that's his job... not part of the client/customer relationship. The same customer principle applies here with the user interface...
Not having a go, just pointing out opportunties [[[[;)]]]]
I have been pointing this out to Steinberg for sometime now and I believe they may even be implementing this in the next version (he says hoping).
For those of us who don't care about real-time playing, why can't the VST act like a sample-file indexing tool that streams the samples into memory as they are played and doesn't load anything other than program parameters? This could be optional for those of us who don't care for real-time playing.
THEN - and this is the real-plus, you could have the entire VSL library running on a single lap-top... or integrated into a single DAW program with zero load times... FANTASTIC... so long as you had the disk-space for it... the disk is the memory... sort of.
Then I may consider upgrading... should be a 1 day job to implement I'd have thought...
Now that would be worth some money (even if it is easy to implement [[[[;)]]]]