UW sample rates, bit depth and memory
2005-09-23 by Gerald Stevens
Greetings, My MD is back, with a shiny new UW glass LCD cover. Paying $250 more than most elektron-friends did must have expedited its return (~1.5 week). I listened to the demo songs / patches, and I must say - I didn't think an MD could sound like that! Now I have to decide how to fill the 32 samples up, and I have some questions. The quick-reference manual says that the MD can recognize any sample-rate up to 48kHz - what about bit-depth? I have a number of sid-generated percussion sounds, some of which sound a little better 8-bit. This would save space, has anyone tried 8 or 12 bit samples yet? Next question - the manual states "Some DSP memory is always reserved for the RAM machines. But the RAM machines benefit from free memory unused by the ROM samples. The more memory free the better RAM machine sample quality." Can someone from elektron explain the memory usage a little better? Is there something like 2.2MB of RAM, and 2MB of ROM? Let's say I want to record two bars at 120BPM, that's 8 "beats" x 1minute / 120 beats = 4 seconds of recording. 4 seconds of 16bit (2byte), 48kHz is 384kB. Two RAM machines filled up with samples like these, and I'm left with 232k? Does that mean if I want decent sounding RAM machines, I should try to keep the ROM under 232k? Since "Some DSP memory is always reserved for the RAM machines", there must be more than 2MB of RAM... how much more? 2.048MB? I have a whole slew of samples ready to install, I'm just wondering where I should draw the line initially. I could just start filling it up, but I'd like to down-select a good set, knowing how much space to leave open. -gerald [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]