Samplers are dead(?)

[Paul Maddox]

All,

 My tuppence worth.

I think samplers died because people wanted higher quality samples,
which means HUGE chunks of RAM and even bigger storage (HDD),
laptops/PC's are ubiquitous enough that most people will have one in
their rig somewhere which will be capable of running the software.

But now a sampler really needs to grab stuff from disk, copy it to ram
and the play it via MIDI, it doesn't need much else, unless you wanna
do funky things, in which case you're going with a PC as it's easier
to edit.

But, if you want to do something live, like play a choir sound then a
chunk of hardware feels more solid than a laptop.
I seen a couple of 'behind the scenes' videos of band tours and
hardware samplers seem to be prefered over laptops, in particular the
big Akai's.

So the trick would seem to be to make a hardware box that plays
samples in various formats that can be loaded onto it before a tour.

Anyway, just my thoughts.
Paul