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Now that I have digged into GigaSamples (The great Free Maestro Grand piano) I am dreaming of a HW sampler that I could take live. Are there any that could load more than one CD at a time?

(The pianos of whatever synthesizer sound so boring compared to these giga-beasts )

Of course I could search the net myself, my today I'm lazy. (And am sure that some of you know without searching )

just have a look at the nemesys website. they are selling indeed a hardware giga for app. 20000 bucks.

imho you can go with whatever Windows box if you use it for nothing but Giga, preferably if it fit's in a rack mount case.
I've recently seen a used PIII/800 in a 19" case sold for 170€, add one of the Gigastation cards with 8 20-bit outs plus Gigapiano and the GM lib for 120€ and off you go, even on Win98.
I don't think that Gigastudio offers a big advantage for live purpose, but even a P4 in those portable 'barebone' all-in-one systems is less than 500€ today afaik.
On the weekend I found a bunch of small Compaq destop systems here in a shop, PII/350 with BX chipset, passively cooled, death silent for 79€ each even that is enough for a live system if it's not supposed to do anything else but sample playback.

my 2 cents, Tom

Err... I had "-marks around hardware GigaSampler, because I'm not looking for a real GigaSampler and definately nothing that has anything to do with Windows

I want a real Hardware sampler, like AKAI S-series, or EMU Ultra or things like that. But AFAIK they don't eat thousands of megabytes of samples, or am I wrong? Can I "upload" a gigasample to internal HD of a sampler and then play that back?

I guess sample playback is enough, and I don't need digital outputs, or multiple analog outs... just a bit of gear that happily plays my huge samples when I'm performing.

hi Spoimala,

unfortunately several companies use those " - marks to promote exactly the opposite of what you intended
They call it Hardware Gigasampler, but it's of course just a PeCe.
Gigasamples can only be played under some flavour of Windows OS due to the 'coding' of attack signals in memory, decay streaming from disk. That's programmed very close to the OS. Since Tascam bought the technology they might offer a unit someday, but I wouldn't hold my breath on that.
If you'd convert large Gigas to even more large Akais, you wouldn't gain any reliability. I'm pretty shure you can reboot a current machine with Giga 3 times before you've loaded such complex (if you get them converted) programs in a hardware sampler.
I consider Giga reliable in a simple stand alone setup (as already mentioned) and you may of course use whatever sound hardware that fits your needs, but I don't see a different way of using those samples.

cheers, Tom

Thanks Tom.
Okay, I have to be happy with lower quality samples. It's a live performance anyway