Peter Seebach wrote:
> Medium-old sound blaster hardware with onboard memory can play back fairly
> large numbers of samples at once, without too much driver help.  

Yes, but I think this refers to the synthesizer (MIDI) part of the
sound hardware. "samples" in this context means ROM based (fixed)
audio samples to emulate music instruments like pianos or drums.
One MIDI port has 16 channels but because one channel can trigger
multiple instruments (and for other reasons like overlaping sounds)
it makes sense to be able to play back more than 16 instruments
("samples") at once. This is why there are soundcards that can
play back 64 or 128 samples simultaniously. But as this are ROM
samples, they cannot be changed and this feature is of no use if
you want to playback .. let's say 5 mp3's at once.
There may be sound cards that uses RAM in addition to ROM for the
MIDI instrument samples to allow an upload of new instruments.
This feature could possibly be tweaked into multi channel audio
playback, but I wouldn't bet that it's possible to reload sample
memory while playback.


Werner