surei01

Hi everybody,

I have recently switched to kx-drivers and am very happy, because now I can get 2 SBLives to work in my old PC. My plan is to use them for a pipe organ software synth. Now I have the following problem: I have a soundfont with about 20MB, which I can load and access without much trouble. The only problem I have is performance.
Loading the soundfont takes about 1 minute (Its a very old PC, AMD K6 with 200MHz and even worse, the graphics card is also on the PCI-bus, now AGP on the motherboard).
While I could live with the long loading time, the response to keyboard input is extremely sluggish. Pressing a single key can mean loading 300kB of sample data, pressing a chord with both hands easily amounts to 2MB. The response to this is so slow, that you canplay a few notes and then wait some seconds for the PC to play them back.

Is there any way to organize soundfont data for more efficient memory access or is it simply so, that my old PC hardware is way beyond its limits?

Are there soundcards having 32MB soundfont memory on board (preferrably older models that I can get cheap via E-Bay)?

What performance can you get with a modern baseline (not high-end) system, having all the basic stuff like graphics and network on the motherboard and only the soundcards using the PCI-bus?

Hope somebody knows more about this.

regards

Reiner

Rivera

Go to this site and download these great pipe organs on soundfont format. The one with the most size is about 2Megs, so it won't bog down your system. Just throw a little reverb on it and you will not be dissapointed.


http://www.gbmuk.fsnet.co.uk/


The only one I know of is the vintage AWE32 which has the capability of accomodating 2 30-pin SIMM, 16 meg memory modules (I have one), and it is quite noisy. Also, I dont think they make these types of soundcards anymore. Why would you want to downgrade to a system with an older sound board? If you are on a budget, your best solution would be to get a second hand system with a least a PII 900 Mhz (it can be gotten for about $150-$200 USD), you might also find it in the garbage-some people consider their older systems rubish. Aside from poor performance, an AMD K6 2 200Mhz, just does not meet todays standards, you will even have sync issues when using older MIDI applications. Best of luck.

Rivera