S&S to ROMplers
Sampling technology came of age in the ’80s, thanks to a number of hardware devices that made it affordable to capture audio and reproduce it at a key stroke. The big problem with sampling, at least at that time, was that it was entirely dependent on RAM (Random Access Memory) to hold the sample in an active state, ready for reproduction.
This meant that many of the most affordable samplers could only hold a few seconds of audio at a time. As has so often been the case with music technology, it took computers to push sampling to the next level. In 1997, the introduction of Gigastudio (aka Gigasampler) brought hard disk streaming of samples to the fore
