As making one's own quality samples can be a delicate operation, most musicians opted instead to use preset samples from the device's resident ROM or loaded from a library disk. The first good wavetable synthesizer was Wolfgang Palm's 1980 German-made PPG Wave 2 Computer , which developed the WaveTerm sampling extension a few years later. After Sequential ceased operation, the VS was taken over by Korg , where it evolved into the popular Wavestation in 1990. Wavetable synthesizers directly targeted acoustic instruments in 1983 with the K250 by Massachusetts-based Kurzweil Music Systems . Kurzweil released the inexpensive K1000 wavetable synthesizers in 1987, stocked with similar high-quality ROM sample sets, including many acoustic instruments.
Many synthesizers feature firmware hooks that give an external computer access to their wavetables.
With appropriate sample-management software, sounds can be loaded directly from almost any source, such as audio CD's or sound files from the web. Several musicians, however, didn't wait for the arrival of affordable samplers and took conventional recording and playback equipment onto the stage to work sampled sounds into their performances. Playing live music atop taped sound effects or backing tracks was fairly conventional in many venues by the late 60's. If you need RealPlayer 5.0, you can download it free here .