Vintage Synth Explorer Forums

Do you need a special kind of floppy disk for these things, or can you use standard store bought ones. Maybe, they just need to be formatted. I'm still really n00by and confused by samplers, but looking to get one pretty soon. Mostly for drums.

Regular floppies will do, you just have to format them. Check out Akai SCSI faq and Akaidisk for good info.

I have 2 different Akai samplers. They both take standard 3.5 inch floppied, either high density (recommended) or low density. They have to be formatted within the sampler.

The interesting thing is that under OS 4.40, the S1000 will read S3000 discs but won't write to any floppies (or hard disc) that have been formatted in the S3000. Even if I reformat the floppy disc completely in the S1000 sampler or in a PC, I get an error message that says "Cannot write to S3000 directory".

If you want to do drums with an Akai sampler, get an old S1000 (with SCSI if you want to use an external HD) and enough RAM, as proprietory Akai RAM is rare and expensive. The S1000 has 8 separate mono outputs as standard, unlike the S3000 series samplers, which have two pairs of stereo out, which can be used as mono outs with devious panning. I only paid £64 for my S1000 and it came with SCSI, 10Mb RAM and about 200 floppies. It has a warm sound too and full sysex implementation for external editing and MIDI control. Although it shares a HD with the S2800i, I still like to feed floppies into it!

Gilles

gcoudert wrote:The S1000 has 8 separate mono outputs as standard, unlike the S3000 series samplers, which have two pairs of stereo out...

The S3000XL has a stereo pair and 8 assignable mono outs. They're fairly cheap too, I think I paid £90 for mine with fully expanded memory and a few disks.

nathanscribe wrote:

gcoudert wrote:The S1000 has 8 separate mono outputs as standard, unlike the S3000 series samplers, which have two pairs of stereo out...

The S3000XL has a stereo pair and 8 assignable mono outs. They're fairly cheap too, I think I paid £90 for mine with fully expanded memory and a few disks.

Oh, I never knew that... That's a good price too. And I suppose you get a resonant filter too, which the S1000 hasn't got.

Gilles

Yeah, but the XL is a pain to hook up to my computers... currently trying to demistify SCSI after failing with the DOS AkaiDisk utility. All because I want to trim my samples in Cubase and ship the wavs over to the Akai ready-edited.

Akai sample format is not WAV compatible, not till the 5000/6000. Prior to that, the format was proprietary. There was the MESA software for Mac and PC (up to OS9, and covering Windows until XP I think but may be wrong on that) which allowed file format conversion and brought the editing onscreen; I don't know about the 1000, but the 3kXL isn't the easiest of machines to work on. It's not the worst either, but squinting at tiny letters in the studio corner does me no good.

I think the 5k/6k go for £150-£250 at the moment, depending on expansion. They're nicely specced, but still use floppies, and the manuals are like War & Peace.

Thanks. Good to know. I want use a bunch of those goofy colorful disks that kids used to get for school!

Since we're on it, I was looking at the S01 since it's super cheap. Since I'm just wanting drums I figure I can live without filters, etc. and I don't have enough mixer channels for indv. outs anyway. Plus with 8 sample spaces I could keep one kit on each disk.

Terrible idea??

Tyler2000 wrote: Plus with 8 sample spaces I could keep one kit on each disk.

That'll depend on the size of the kit and the resolution of the samples. My Roland R8 sample kit spans 4 floppies so it now resides on the HD! Long samples (cymbals) and stereo samples (some snares) take up a lot of space and floppies will only hold 1.44Mb of data, which is VERY small. You'll have to back up all your floppies too as they can be a bit temperamental.

If you can invest in a cheap sampler, make sure it has SCSI and get maybe a SCSI Zip drive to use instead of the FD drive. I once had an S2000 with an 200Mb Iomega SCSI Zip drive and that was a decent set up.

Also, if you have enough RAM to hold several kits, you could save them all in the same Akai Volume on Zip, have them all loaded at the same time under different program numbers on the same MIDI channel. You could switch between them with the data wheel or using a simple MIDI program change message from the sequencer. I have a TR808/909 kit, CR78 kit, and combi kit (Simmons toms + R8 + Linn stuff) set up that way for the S2800i.

Gilles