Rompler
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A rompler is an electronic musical instrument that plays back samples stored in ROM chips to generate sound. Romplers lack the ability to record such samples and have limited or no capability for generating original waveforms. This is in contrast to samplers, which let the user record samples as well as play them back.
The term rompler is a portmanteau of the terms ROM and sampler, and as with samplers, a rompler can have additional sound editing features, such as layering of several waveforms and modulation with ADSR envelopes and LFOs.
The E-mu Proteus line of products and the Roland U-20 are well-known romplers. Romplers are often packaged as sound modules. Almost all digital pianos and many electronic keyboards made for the home market (such as the Yamaha PSR-290) are romplers.
The term rompler is sometimes used to describe software instruments (such as VSTis) that only play sounds (samples), with no ability to record new sounds. In this instance the samples are played back from computer RAM after being loaded from disk, rather than from ROM chips. Many software instruments described as samplers have no ability to "sample" audio and therefore might be described more correctly as "sample players". Well-known examples of software romplers are reFX Nexus and Spectrasonics Omnisphere.
