well 1 minute... for me ACID has nothing to do with samplers.. I mean it is a WAVE SEQUENCER... and a sampler is MORE than that


you can find AKAI CDROMs with INSTRUMENTS such as strings, piano, and stuff... those are NOT LOOPS but whole instruments where you can play chords, melodies etc.. THIS is what sampler can do, and what people generally dont realize.. they think you can use a sampler only to loop stuff... no... you can turn it into a realistic sounding MIDI module...

anyway...

software vs hardware sampler now...

I can speak, because i've been using REALITY for 2 years, then GIGASAMPLER for a year or so, and then... AKAI S6000 256MB RAM for a year or so.

I sold th eAKAI a few months ago because i was moving to another country (the beast is huge and costs alot to move).

Anyway... The software is NOT STABLE at all.. you never know when your computer is going to crash... the hardware ALWAYS work fine. Also the software does NOT have the polyphony they claim, the hardware does (ie 128 notes played at the same time on my AKAI was perfectly stable). Also (yes...) the hardware has NO LATENCY time, the software takes a lot of milliseconds to trigger the sound.

Plus other things...

basically, if software samplers were that good, AKAI, EMU and other YAMAHA would not sell any sampler.. but they DO! More than ever.

Anyway tht's just my 2cents from my own experience.. I did love giga, i did love reality, etc... UNTIL i got a real sampler. Then I understood how good hardware was.



but wait... if you would use a sampler only to playback a loop... well you can use software.. coz you only need 1 voice of polyphony to do that, and you dont use much resources... will work fine.

hope this helps