[linux-audio-dev] Gigasampler vs Halion PR war

[Benno Senoner]

I suspect that Steinberg (and others) went the wait-and-see attitude.
They recognized that the patent was simply too broad and that an
eventual lawsuit would have caused quite a controversy in the audio
world. (Perhaps damaging good relations between Tascam and other audio
sw producers, generating bad press and probably in the end resulting in
the patent declared invalid).

Plus it seems that soon there will be new contenders on the commercial
disk based samplers area.I believe that regarding the patent they took
the same stance as (probably) Steinberg did.
 For example Native Instrument announced that
they will add disk streaming support to their Kontakt sampler this
month.
----
http://www.nativeinstruments.de/index.php?kontakt_us
Direct From Disc extension
In November 2002 a free Mac and PC update for registered KONTAKT users
will add the Direct From Disc extension. This feature will enable
KONTAKT to play samples directly from the hard drive. Sample size will
no longer be limited by the amount of physical RAM - an instrument can
be as large as available hard drive space. All instruments utilizing
this technology will load many times faster than RAM-based instruments. 
---

You are probably aware that Invision has a patent about the PC softsynth
this means that there are literally hundreds of such apps "violating"
the patent. 
The idea of caching data in RAM that resides on a mass storage device is
just too old, it has existed since the first mass storage device was
introduced.
Anyway if you care, in the good old Amiga days I implemented routines
that allowed the streaming of large audio clips from disk and CDROM with
instant play by caching the first part of the clip in RAM.
It was 1991-92 I believe the project was part of an italian version
of the Grolier Encyclopedia for the Amiga and that strange CD-like
player amiga device. (I do not remember the name anymore).

This is just a small example of "prior art" :-)
I guess there are hundreds other of examples too. 

I fully agree with what David Burrows said. :-)
cheers,
Benno

Paul Davis wrote:
>>Do we know what Steinberg did about this, if anything?

>i asked karl steinberg. he was unwilling to say anything about it. 


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