Rain Recording

GigaStudio is an excellent system for playing back musical instrument libraries; however, in trying to play back 32 simultaneous channels of 96kHz/24-bit audio with sample-accuracy, it places a huge demand on software that only loads a small part of each sample into RAM. When Giga has to retrieve 16 stereo samples from the disk, the latency in disk response can cause some stereo samples to be triggered late compared to others. An offset of mere milliseconds between identical samples can be clearly audible, and this does not meet the needs of a true 32-channel playback system.

However, we can force GigaStudio to load a greater part of the start of each sample into memory, reducing demand on the hard disk in the critical few seconds at the start of sample playback. You must first reboot Windows and launch GigaStudio again. After your .gsp file is loaded, play the first 2 seconds of every sample. We use a MIDI sequence to do this for us. GigaStudio has access to a cache of RAM that it fills up with the first data you play from disk, and proceeds to do so until the cache is full, after which it will always stream from disk. However, the second time you play the data that has been loaded in the "cache", it will stream from RAM, allowing true instantaneous response time.

This behavior can be witnessed using Windows' own System Performance Monitor. You can access this from the Start Menu, as long as you have "Display Administrative Tools" checked in the Start Menu Preferences. Here, you can set the Performance Monitor to graph, in real-time, the parameter "Current Disk Read Time" for the Physical Disk that contains your audio files. Observe: after a fresh reboot of Giga, the first time you play a sample, it will stream from disk right away, and you will see the high disk activity level as it is read from the drive. However, the second time you play the same sample, the disk activity is flatlined (if your system is set up correctly - if not, Rain can help!). This shows that the sample is now streaming from RAM.

This RAM "cache" has a limit to how much it can hold, depending again on your system. This cache will keep its sample data loaded until your system is rebooted. It should still be used to your advantage, by loading as much of the start of all your samples as you can!