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+2 votes
With some sample libraries, everything works fine, but with others I get these high volume glitches followed by audio dropouts. Is there some way that I can fix this problem?
in Using the Sampler by
recategorized by decentsamples

1 Answer

+1 vote

The TLDR version of this answer is that you need to increase your buffer size in the Preferences... window.

The sampler has two playback modes: RAM and Disk Streaming. Disk Streaming is the default mode, and almost definitely the one you should use. 

Computers and phones and tablets have two kinds of storage: RAM storage and disk storage. RAM is fast, there isn't very much of it to go around, and it's only for temporary use. Disk storage is slower and more permanent, and there's a lot more of it. Disk storage is where we store our files–files like sample libraries.

In order for a sampler to playback audio files, it needs to read the data from the disk storage. But that disk storage is slow. To make matters worse, other apps are requesting data and using CPU and doing other stuff all which makes it even more likely that the sampler won't get the data it needs in time, and if the sampler can't read data fast enough, you'll get noticeable gaps and pops in the audio. 

One way around this is to pre-cache some of the data in RAM. That's what the preload buffer is. 

If you increase the preload buffer, you increase the reliability of the sampler, but you use more RAM. 

Another way to increase reliability is to use buffers. Instead of reading the audio data one byte at a time from the disk, the sampler reads whole chunks of bytes called buffers. The bigger these chunks are, the more reliable things are, and that's what the read buffer settings are.

All of this is a long way of saying you should try to increase these buffer sizes. :)

by decentsamples (6.3k points)
edited by decentsamples
I have found that there are other influences that afect glitches, clicks and other audio ephermera. The Release time can be useful in removing clicks due to Note Stealing, for instance. it seems that this is a very complicated subject, and so very prone to TLDR...
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