That's exactly WHY they sound so good, though, Dreamer.
And Akai samples sets tend to top out at 32MB for entire instruments, only a few tend to be more. This reflects the limited RAM you could get into one of those. So the sounds have already been optimized for limited RAM samplers. But a T3 can hold a GB of RAM. An astounding amount, compared to Akai's. But unfortunately, the load times for it have gotten WORSE, not better over the last ten years. My Kurzweil (fifteen year old design) can do 1MB/sec. The T2 was at least four times as slow!
Those Akai samples were already trimmed down to what the developers thought was as small as they could possibly go and sound as good as they are. Trust me, if they thought they could make them smaller, they would have. Trimming them even further is, firstly, and exercise in patience (you know how many different samples are in the average four-way piano set?
or a three-way full drumkit?), and takes considerable skill to compromise the original patch as little as possible. There's a REASON why sample sets, especially acoustic instruments, and especially for limited RAM samplers (GIGA is a piece of cake with no RAM limits!) are primarily made by very skilled third parties and cost so much. Few even have the skill to play and record the samples well in the first place...
How many of you have access to a world class grand, in a world class room, with world class mikes and pre's to record it with? Or access to a world class trumpeter, capable of consistent tone and pitch control for all the notes? Or a mizmar player, or an exhaustive collection of world percussion, and the technique to play it well?
All I am saying is that if using the sampler in your arranger is of any importance, pressuring your manufacturer, by whatever it takes, to speed up the load times is CRITICAL. That is, of course, unless you LIKE to spend days editing .wav files to squeeze them down to something small enough to load in the same time that an ancient ten year old sampler could have loaded the originals in in the first place...!
And for all you Yamaha fans, pressuring Yamaha to recognize the de facto standard of Akai import will save you days, if not weeks of tedious work to convert Akai disks into .wav format, and have to laboriously do ALL the sample mapping yourself. Maybe some of you don't realize, but Akai import brings in dozens, if not hundreds of different samples into a multisample set, and loads them all, along with their note position and velocity splits, with no work on your part at all. With a Yamaha, you have to split them ALL out into the individual samples, note CAREFULLY where each and every single one of them goes along with it's arcane name, and then laboriously, BY HAND, reassemble those in the Yamaha. Then save it... at around four times SLOWER than they even load up at (this is a well documented problem)..!
Several HOURS to save the entire memory...
Maybe THIS will wake you up to the reality of using this potentially useful feature that in practice turns out to be a complete boondoggle. It's all well and good in theory, but the practice makes it limited to only the skilled and patient few.
WHY should you have to do all this work, when Akai import would absolve you of it completely, and at least speeding up the RAM pipe would make it no slower than it was fifteen years ago (when everyone used Akai samplers if they used samplers at all, other than the few Roland, Kurzweil and Emu users - Akai were the dominant sampler for years). Patience is one thing, but these are features that existed long ago. Why should they not be on a current sampler, if not better ones?
Make some noise