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http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/dec98/articles/gigasample.143.htm

Imagine a sampler with almost unlimited memory that doesn't cost a fortune, and runs on a PC using a standard soundcard. Martin Walker installs Gigasampler, and prepares to be amazed.

Anyone who has ever tried to replace real instruments with sampled versions will know just how much memory they tend to use. Many professional musicians find themselves filling the entire 32Mb (or more) of a hardware-based sampler with a single acoustic piano, and often find themselves using two or three samplers running simultaneously. The problem is that many acoustic instruments sound odd if transposed by more than a few notes, which means that lots of samples are needed to reproduce the full range of the instrument. This in turn means that each sample has to be shorter to fit in a certain size of RAM. Continuous sounds have to end up with shorter loops (giving a bland sound), and long one-shot sounds have to have their end portions looped to achieve realistic decay times.