There has been "instant play" devices prior gigasampler. I also found following from Usenet archives. I also have a product adv which can be used as directly-from-disk MIDI sampler with fades; I will scan and place this adv available soon. Year is 1990. Juhana ==cut== Subject: Re: Why buy a digital transport? Date: 04/12/1995 Author: Mark Brindle <brindle(a)lf.hp.com> [ cut ] : a totaly error free transport system which would alow random play and : near ( sub 10ms ) access to any audio on the cd-rom ?? You've just described a hard-disk recorder. But, if you want to save some money, and you don't plan to edit the music, you could get by without the hard drive. Substitute a few megs of RAM; and if you need *INSTANT* access, cache the first second of every "cut" in memory -- then, you could start playing any track with only a few microseconds delay. Of course, anything quicker than about 50ms seems instantaneous to mere mortals. ...it's "only" software, Mark ==end==