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Once upon a time, I relied on hardware samplers for all my sampling and sample playback needs - I was perfectly happy with my Akai S1000 and Kurzweil K2000. Software samplers just weren't reliable enough for serious production work and they offered far less performance than you could get with a dedicated hardware sampler. But times have changed, and software samplers have come a long way.
The first release of GigaSampler struck a major blow for software sampler acceptance by offering something hardware units really couldn't provide: the ability to stream samples from hard drive rather than strictly from RAM. This innovative concept allowed sound designers to work with extremely long samples, which provided much more realistic results than short looped samples. GigaSampler enjoyed reign as the only real software sampler option for several years.
Now, of course, there are several very powerful competing software samplers on the market. But GigaSampler - now known as "GigaStudio," certainly hasn't rested on its laurels. Version 3, on review here, offers a ton of powerful features - the capabilities have surpassed what most of us will ever use, with one important caveat: Everything depends on your computer. The new version features unlimited polyphony. So if you have a stout-hearted, heavily muscled PC to power GigaStudio, you'll get more notes of polyphony than you can probably use - although voices can be used up very quickly if you have long release times and if you're stacking instruments together, so you can never have too much polyphony on tap. As a benchmark, I ran GigaStudio 3 on a Sweetwater Creation Station CSRack; a 3.2GHz Pentium 4 loaded with 2GB of RAM and dual SATA hard drives. That machine had no problem cranking out 420 voices of 24-bit polyphony; pretty darn amazing.
There's another aspect of GigaStudio 3 that will tax your long- suffering CPU: GigaPulse, the new convolution reverb/ambience/ resonance...