bb.linuxsampler.org

A small amount of a sample is cached into RAM before streaming a patch from disc, right? How much is precached that way? 64kb? More? Is it varying depending on the gig instrument? With linuxsampler VST for 64bit soon to be released I was wondering how many instruments we could load on a 8 gig Vista 64 PC. I recall a posting in VSL forum that you would need 8 PCs with Gigastudio to load 75.000 samples (which should be about 40% of VSL's First Edition) because there would be a limit of Giga of 1 GB loaded samples per PC (http://community.vsl.co.at/forums/t/19935.aspx). How many LS PCs would be need to achive the same result?

That depends on the samples used. LinuxSampler preloads a fix amount of sample points. This constant value can be defined at compile time by the ./configure script switch --enable-preload-samples=65536 . I think the current Windows binaries use this value (65536). So let's say you have a stereo sample with 16 bit, then the amount of precached data for one sample would be: 2 (stereo) * 2 byte (16 bit) * 65536 = 262144 bytes , but of course only if the sample is large enough.

Okay this means LS can load 4096 16bit stereo samples per gigabyte ram. When I calculated it correctly.

Very roughly yes. You still have other overheads which would reduce it, and if you got very small samples, it would increase it.