Overview of Internal Data Storage

nGen stores everything internally as floating point (real) numbers. On most systems each piece of data stored by the program needs 4 bytes (a 32-bit implementation of floating point numbers). Additionally, to create certain flexible features, nGen stores each note list in memory before it is written to disk. Therefore, on systems with small amounts of RAM there may be memory issues with extremely large note lists (such as those created by granular synthesis). The following formula will give an approximate indication of how much memory is used by the program:

Number of Bytes Used = ((4 * number_of_pfields) + 2) * number_of_events

(a 1000 event i-block with 10 p-fields will take about 41k of RAM).