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Sample Time in iOS samplers
Apologies for starting a new thread if this has been discussed previously. Did a search and couldn't find threads addressing it.
Anyway, can someone fill me in on the subject of sample-time limits among different iOS samplers?
So far I have noticed that samplers such as Bleass, Chameleon and AudioLayer put pretty short limits on sample times when used in FX slots in Aum for example (with chameleon being the shortest and AudioLayer being the longest of the 3).
It seems in standalone you can get slightly longer times and even longer with sample import. Yet in all cases it seems surprisingly short to me. Whereas the almighty Koala seems not to have placed this limitation (or at least I seem to recall it being much longer).
Is there a reason for this and a setting or trick to get around it in the above samplers I’m just not seeing?
Thanks in advance. Your help as a community has been invaluable so far!
Comments
What limitation are you finding in AudioLayer?
Loopy probably supports the longest samples. Btw, both Loopy and AudioLayer do diskstreaming and can handle far larger sample time than will load in memory (koala keeps all samples in memory).
For now unless an AUv3 does disk-streaming there's a limit on how much memory an AUv3 Plug-In can use.
This might change with iPadOS16.
Then there's there's the thin line what a 'Sample' actually is. Is it a 3+ minute audio track or a ~2 second one-shot?
I'd say if longer samples are needed it really is better to use a DAW that is dedicated to sampling such as BM3...
Cheers!
Oh, you’re right. Indon’t know what I did wrong last night in AL. I was going through several tests. It seemed to stop around the 12 second mark.
I just double checked now and no such limit. I didnt wait for it to stop but it went on for a long time.
Just now I got different, but also weird behaviour from Bleass. It sampled longer, but when I played back the sample, it played the default sample until I saved it as a preset and opened it again. Last night, as mentioned I had short sample times but this behaviour did not occur.
Im doing other tests now to see if I can troubleshoot whats happening…
There’s no standard for recording time limits. As you’ve learned, it varies from app to app.
AUv3 versions have more limits on the RAM that they can use than standalone apps do. From what I understand it isn’t possible to predict over-use and prevent crashes, so developers have to take a guess at what is safe.
As mentioned, the few apps that implement disk streaming can get away with more.
There is no general setting that can get around this. The only app I’ve seen that provides any choice is Enso. That one has a single option to enable longer recordings. But even then it’s pretty short.
Thanks folks.
I think I was experiencing memory problems. Turns out I discovered one of my browsers had crashed this morning. While this hadnt posed a problem before, It had a lot of tabs open, many with youtube vids. This morning I opened it and found all the tabs gone. So it had crashed sometime between last night and this morning.
So I did some house keeping, reboot, reinstalls and everything seems to be performing better.
There are limits on Bleass SW2 and Chameleon, but longer than I was experiencing yesterday. And as I discovered earlier today (thanks @espiegel123) AudioLayer was already behaving better than last night. No limit encountered on sample time.
Sorry. I should have maybe waited longer and mucked about more before posting.
This is a great topic to discuss since new solutions drop every month or two…
This was the conversation a day before Koala…
https://forum.audiob.us/discussion/27778/what-does-sampler-mean-to-you-types-of-samplers/p1
Sampler users come to this use case from Hardware devices like Akai’s. I come from the Kurweil keyboard which allowed software instruments to be purchased. So I see AudioLayer or Decent Sampler as my perfect tool. Loopy Pro and Koala are more like the loop playback or chopping hardware which suits another music producers gear.
Yeah, I came of age first with the Ensoniq Eps and then a Roland S-760. For most of the 90’s I was ride or die with the Roland. I still kind of miss it.
I will read that thread, Im quite interested. As to what a sample is, for me, it was whatever I could fit into my S-760 memory for whatever I needed or wanted to do at any given time. I was working with everything from short one shots, to sampled synth waveforms, using the onboard envelopes and filters, to field recordings, to quick edits for obnoxious ads, to recording live instrument and vocal parts. I was working with it before hard drive recording was a thing. I had an ADAT but found it clunky and only used it for when I needed full live performances. Later with the advent of romplers and heavy duty disc streaming piano samples - all keys, all velocities, full decay kind of thing I found it luxurious but it didnt alter my perception of what a sample/sampler was.
I had to see what the S-760 looked like:
Then I had to find some specs from a seller on Reverb.com (8 days ago):
"Fully stocked with 32MB's"... AUv3's have 340MB limitations.
"Chicken Systems" is another historical clue to how samplers needed extra assistance to navigate file formats that needed conversions.
Notice the MEMORY hierarchy in hardware from this era:
Slowly, IOS has also added access to external storage solutions but the file system is still a very closely guarded resource to protect the system from security exploits.
That would be she.
I had an Atari, a Mackie, a consumer DAT machine, an ADAT, a nice mic, a Drawmer compressor and an ensoniq DP4 for 4 separate or combined effects. I didnt even really pay attention to what the latest thing was for years. I was happy. I worked with that same setup, more or less, for probably 10 years. No GAS. All choons.
I messed around with storage as things improved. SCSI drives. jazz drives… I never really used ADATs as storage. tbh, I don’t even remember knowing it could be done. I sold mine eventually and rented if I ever needed one.
32 MBs of RAM felt pretty decent at the time. There was a sense that we were in it’s infancy and it would grow exponentially eventually, but we could still get shit done with it.
Mon SAMPLER préféré est SAMPLIST: no time limit, and timestretch live !!!!
Christian
France
AUv3?
There is a call that can be made to the OS level to find out how much RAM you have to work with in an AU, but it is complicated. The RAM limit isn't on the individual plugin instance, but on all the instances running in a given host. So, tracking memory usage gets complex and dealing with how to handle memory warnings and errors to display to the user could get weird as new samples are loaded in an existing plugin instance or new instances are added. The memory limits are device dependent and somewhat runtime dependent too. A dev pretty much needs to take a strategy of minimizing RAM usage in an iOS AUv3 wherever possible.
For most of us 32MB was huge! The S-760 was part of the lower-cost wave of 16-bit samplers which used generic SIMM memory - compared to the previous models using proprietary memory upgrades became cheap. And compared to the 12-bit models of a few years before, no comparison!
I ended up with an Emu E4K which I found ex-demo, this replaced a couple of Turtle Beach sound cards which had onboard RAM.
I was similar: 3 Akai S950s (2 fully expanded, 1 not) triggered from Cubase on an AtariST that was slaved to a Fostex 4 track (running at double speed) via a smpte stripe. The Fostex had 2 tracks of vocals & (usually) a track of guitar feedback & whammy bar noises/atmospheres.
All of the rest - guitars (riffs, chord progressions, etc), bass guitar, drums (i.e. 1 shot samples to augment our drum machines), breaks & typical one-shot sound samples (noises, atmosphere’s, speech cutups, etc) were all in the Akais. Basically hard disk recording before hard disk recording was a thing. We were pre-adat by about 2 years at that point (not that we could afford one anyway when they did arrive) so it was more to overcome the lack of tracks on tape to record to than anything else tbh. Then everything was mixed live to DAT as if they‘d been recorded on traditional tape via 2 chained mixing desks (1 ours, 1 borrowed).
Once Cubase VST tech eventually came along it seemed like such a relief at the time - but in hindsight we became less inventive and it certainly wasn’t anywhere near as fun.
Before the Akais we used a delay pedal that had the capability to sample 2 seconds of sound which you could then trigger via the pedal‘s foot switch. No storage, every sample was „played“ on to tape live as it were (lots of use of the Fostex‘s drop-in functionality - and bouncing… lots & lots of bouncing 😬). We did 3 nights supporting Meat Beat Manifesto using those backing tracks. I got in to a conversation about how we only had that pedal at that time with Jack Dangers in the green room & he was really geeking out about the whole punk ethos of it 😂😂
Sounds quite similar.
Also, not long before I was able to borrow a bit of cash and get into the sampling and digital recording, I was running on Radio Shack and Casio-type thingies and a boss delay pedal. I would sometimes convince people to loan me their stuff. One of my favourites was an Effectron. Also in those days someone in my neighbourhood loaned me a rusty old Italian 8 channel mixer with a spring reverb built in. It triggered my life-long love affair with Spring verb and Dub. My first recordings were done using the line in on my childhood Sony “ghetto blaster”.
I was really bad at keeping track of and cataloguing my music. But in my memory i was way more creative before I had access to professional gear and gigs.
It‘s funny you say that because I met up recently for a meal with our guitarist (I haven’t seen him in about 15 years) and we came to the exact same conclusion - that the more things became easier as the technology got better the less creative we got generally.
We had to be pretty inventive back then with the tech that we could afford and it seemed to feed the creativity - and vice-versa. I mean, we had to really work at getting our samples when all we had was a 2 second delay pedal with a sample mode that we had to trigger by hand (it was a pedal - no midi in!!) Want the sample in a different pitch? Or at a different speed? Well that required recording it to tape after altering the tape recorder‘s speed dial so it was literally recorded to tape at a different speed & pitch…
Kids today eh! With their Koalas & Riffers & Beatly Pros & Playbeats & etc, etc old-man grumble grumble 😂🤣😂
One tip has always been useful for the craftsman: "Know your tools."
With Internet Speed this now means: "Pick a few tools and really learn them."
We all have more tools than we can master in multiple lifetimes. But tool collecting is a great hobby too.
Ok, thats pretty motivated.
I probably wouldn't have gone that far. My other passion was going to my favourite dive bar and meeting cute girls from the nearby art college. That probably would have won out given the choice. I was 18-19 when I was starting out after all. 
Ruining everything!
Tool collecting can be quite addictive. Especially on iOS. Cheap, alluring, plentiful apps that you can’t audition before you buy… sales almost daily….
I never stood a chance.