It might happen, but ray tracing and the vector multiplication stuff it involves is not too useful when it comes to audio really. Or at least nobody has put enough thought into it to discover any useful ways of using it yet.

It could be great to make stuff more analog though.. you have a lot of processes that could add random variation to your sound..

 

Last edited: Jul 10, 2020

Not quite what I meant, GPUs can be used as a processor to offload processing which will free up the CPU to perform other tasks.

 

Yeah i get that, still gpus are not very good at general processing tasks. They are very good at a few rather specific tasks but in some ways limited when it comes to others. Plus the major problem is that sending data to the gpu and getting it back is really the limiting factor in a lot of cases. The connection to the gpu is not too well suited for realtime communication that involves a lot of time critical data which audio data most certainly would be.

 

If I get some time off work soon I might do some coding and see if there is any benefit in this.

 

True.
In 10 years my 12" is nothing.

 

Go for it. I mean if nobody ever would try out new things, there would be no progress, but I wouldn't put too much energy into it because I am sure that a lot of very intelligent people already put quite a lot of thought into it and up to now, not much has come out of it or better hardly anything. There is a reason why there are specialized dsps and gpus.. If they would both do the same stuff equally well only one of them would exist. But feel free to prove me wrong at any time.

 

Last edited: Jul 10, 2020

well umm, sample libraries contain samples, so if you want lots of various samples, it will take space of course,
it's not technically possible to describe lossless sound digitally with smaller filesize,

if you have problems with samples taking too much space, then use modelling synths which generate audio from nothing,
for ex. something like SWAM takes few MB's because the instruments are not sample-based

 

I guess I don't necessarily have a problem with the samples taking too much space, still it is a valid question to ask if the size of the library is actually justified or if it is more based on marketing reasons or maybe even for some kind of copy protection. You could easily create a library that has 4 TB and that is only sold on a special ssd or whatever. That wouldn't mean that all that space actually contains valuable content that will benefit the user. It very well could be that most of the ssd is filled with random data and that the whole thing has been created only so people can't copy it as easily. You can always increase the sample rate or the bit rate and the space requirements will go up and up and up, but at some point it is not so much for reasons of audio quality anymore, it rather meets a demand that was created by the marketing people.
I guess size does matter, but at a certain point it will start to hurt and you will have to decide whether it is worth it or not.

 

GPUs are only useful to do the same thing millions of times on a lot of data. If you need to do anything differently, it will cost you. Any communication between CPU and GPU is also a bottleneck, this means additional latency would be a must.

 

yes with time , it will be the NORM

 

yep, and unpacking it means you have to have at least half a terabyte of free space. you can delete the extra files later, but getting there takes a lot of extra space.

 

ah so your question was meant from this point of view,
well, I have very similar opinion/mindset about softwares, like for ex. why iPhone Facebook App takes around 240MB while desktop Reaper MacOS app needs less than 130MB being a fully featured DAW,

I think it's a matter of developer's ethics and workflow efficiency, apart from the marketing hype you mentioned,
let's say an engineer records tons of orchestra samples, it can be easier for devs to just throw them all into tons of presets rather than handpicking the most usable ones,

I also think (and seen many other people mention it) recently sample libraries creators tend to "recycle" their previous samples in new collections and products, which often is of no benefit to end user, especially if they already bought other libraries from the company before,

heck I'd even bet many of the companies are making the huge sample libraries on purpose for sister site members, because anyone who could afford to buy them could easily afford own recording rig to obtain own unique samples, especially if they need some quad/ambeo/surround/binaural stuff

on a side note....

 

Choose the product accordingly.If you're a pro, go with extra dynamic layers,extra microphone positions and what not.If you just want a decent sounding collection of instruments,choose the ones which you can afford to work with(both monetarily and system specifications wise). I remember this written in the footnote of someone's comment here,(or may be the sister site) "You can't have have everything,where would you keep it". I recommend following this advice.

 

tetris evolve

 

Meanwhile, Omnisphere is 80 GB big and no complains.

 

I guess if you really had everything you would also have the space to keep it, but if you can't have everything, why would you choose to have the space to keep everything, if you didn't need it.

 

You might get away with having enough space to extract the first 100gb you downloaded. if you need to extract again you might get away with deleting the already extracted files while you are still extracting, but yeah, it would suck if something goes wrong and you don't have the downloaded files anymore because you already deleted everything because you needed the space. That will only work if you don't end up with a iso file that you need to install in the end though

 

Logically,you're correct but you missed my point perhaps.

 

Let's not forget Spitfire's Hans Zimmer Piano. One instrument = 100GB

 

103 GB, Kontakt uses some type of voodoo (supposedly) lossless compression that cuts size in half, after installing you can delete the archives
**** Approx. 220 GB of uncompressed content (compressed content size is approx.103 GB)

Stop complaining and buy a bigger harddrive