The term “soundware” could be loosely used to describe any sort of software used to reproduce the sound of a real acoustic instrument. In the late 1980s, digital samples were tiny (128k) and came on those big, floppy disks (as in the E-MU Emulator I) or 3.5-inch diskettes (as in the Sequential Prophet 2000, AKAI S1000, and many others). By the early 1990s, sound designers began putting sample collections onto CD-ROMs. Not surprisingly, Sweetwater was one of the first companies to pioneer the CD-ROM for soundware distribution, with our libraries for the Kurzweil K2000 and its progeny. Today, sophisticated soundware libraries can be measured in gigabytes – or even hundreds of gigabytes!