Rompler: History and Key Facts

A rompler is an electronic musical instrument that plays pre-fabricated sounds based on audio samples. The term rompler is a blend of the terms ROM and sampler. In contrast to samplers, romplers do not record audio. Both may have additional sound editing features, such as layering several waveforms and modulation with attack, decay, sustain and release envelopes (ADSR), filters and low-frequency oscillators (LFO).

The waveforms are commonly stored in form of PCM-encoded waveforms which were similar to those stored in WAV or AIFF file formats, although in some hardware design other encodings and forms of (usually lossless) compression could be used.

The core characteristic of a rompler, compared to a sampler, is that they do not have the ability to record new samples, or in case of software instruments, the ability to add user samples from disk.

Note that earlier digital synthesizers, which used short-cycle sampled waveforms, are usually not considered romplers but are either called "PCM synthesizers" or "wavetable synthesizers" because the sampled waveform in this case is usually only made of a single full cycle (or a handful of full cycles) of the wave and would therefore be a fraction of a second in length, whereas in case of a sampler or a rompler, the recording would usually contain the sample's decay and sometimes even release sections, such as with a recorded drum hit or piano note. Also, in their usage of sampled waves, filters (usually digital) were employed to gradually alter the timbre of cycling wave which makes them somewhat similar to analog subtractive synthesizers. However, in many such designs, the attack section of a sound was often sampled as a full, longer sample, and then crossfaded or mixed with the looping PCM waveform, such as with Roland's linear arithmetic synthesis and its competitors from other manufacturers, further blurring the difference.

Source and attribution

Text excerpted from Rompler by Wikipedia contributors, available under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0. The extract is abridged and formatting has been adjusted; the adapted text on this page is shared under the same licence. Revision history.