How do they do it?

[GamezBond]

I see keyboards with like 64 MB of sound rom, but with like thousands of patches.When I record some of the patches, they can be like 1 MB by themselves...what I'm wondering is how is all the sound compressed to that size without losing quality

 

[Atterion]

First off we are generally talking about 64Mb of the raw waveforms (The components of a patch), which is quite different then say a wav file recording of the finished sound. Manufacturers often use a proprietary compression format to help fit extra info inside the alotted ROM memory. Generally speaking a 64Mb synth may only use a few hundred Kilobytes to store all the information to how all the patches are constructed (several hundred patches worth...i.e. my N264 is 64Mb ROM, and uses like 80kb to store 200 programs, and 200 combis worth of info to disk, with all FX settings, etc. for each).