Ensoniq Mirage sample library?

[abruzzi]

Does the HxC software do some very low level access on the drive that it can't do over USB?

Basically this. For FAT to work as a standard it specifies track, sector etc. While all PC people used to think of HD 3.5 in floppies and 1.44mb, they were different capacities on other devices. My Amiga writes 1.760mb on a HD floppy because the layout on the disk is different. Most (all?) USB floppies take care of the track/sector stuff and let the OS worry about the next level up. To read/write a Ensoniq floppy you need it to give the lower level stuff to the computer.

(Basically the reason is a USB floppy acts as a class compliant mass storage medium like a USB flash drive. For that to happen it can only give the OS control over certain parts of the process, the same parts it gives with the flash rom. Tracks and sectors aren't part of that.)

[madtheory]

Ah cool thanks, that makes sense

[elsongs]

I used to have an EPS/ASR10 and converted quite a few of these Mirage disks to EPS/ASR format, but the only sounds that were converted to WAV were a few horn stab samples.

Are you saying you still have the sounds you want but they're trapped in EPS/ASR format? Because that's a solvable problem.

Well, I sold the disks and the EPS (though I sold them to a friend who I haven't been in contact with in years, but he does live locally), and the sounds that I did save are trapped in some Zip Disks...I have the Zip disks, but no Zip Drive (Well, I do have one, but it's a SCSI drive...) Hoo boy, gotta love obsolesence.
I do have Chicken Systems Translator though.

[Baus]

The Soundprocess OS is not in the public domain. Rights are still owned by Syntaur and it is still a commercial product.

As far as I know there are many copies of it around because at one point Ensoniq supplied it with newly bought Mirages.

I highly recommend getting the PDF Manual and watch my tutorials about the Mirage and Soundprocess on Youtube.
Any questions about it are always welcome.

Keep in mind that Soundprocess is a different format than the regular Mirage OS format and sounds made with it cannot be loaded into the EPS/16Plus/ASR-10.

It's great to have though. I don't use anything else but Soundprocess in my Mirages.

[abruzzi]

That makes sense. I did buy a copy of SP, I just didn't know if Syntaur was just distributing it without any official permission, like the rom sellers on eBay.

By the way, I borrowed a disposal Toughbook from work to test. They have a removable floppy, so I didn't really know how well they would work with the low level apps. There was no hard drive so I started from the HD floppy that you get when you download the EPS os from Rubber Chicken. It's basically a windows 98/dos boot disk with some ram disk software copies of the EPS operating systems and a dos based EPS disk writing program. I made some small modifications to the disk using my Mac, removing the EPS OSs, adding mread and mwrite. So it happily booted off the floppy, I used mread to make a disk image of the soundprocess os, and mwrite to write the image to blank, mirage formatted floppy, and it worked.

Unfortunately it has to go back on Monday since even if it is getting disposed, its not my property (work is picky about those things.). But I know for certain that a Panasonic Toughbook CF-29 will work. These can be found cheap because they can't be upgraded past XP, but since they all come from corporate disposals, most will have no hard drive. They're also heavy duty and bulletproof. They're also very modular so I can put together exactly what I need on eBay. And now that I know they will work, I'll start getting the pieces I need to start ripping images.

Just out of curiosity, for those that may have done it, once I have an read generated image file, what needs to be done to it to make it usable in an HxC? I haven't gotten that far yet.

[Rasputin]

So long as the files aren't in EDM format they are easy to convert to HxC/HFE images. mread and Omniflop (and other floppy utilities) that just read the raw data and don't add any headers, etc. can be loaded straight into the HxC software and then you just tell the HxC software to expect an Ensoniq Mirage 440K image and that's about it.

EDM format requires jumping through a bunch of hoops because even though the HxC software supposedly supports EDM, I don't think it was well tested because in my experience it doesn't really work unless you've only taken a raw image and simply (improperly) renamed it as EDM.

Giebler formats pretty much need to die, in my opinion. They're horrible for future archival use and should be abandoned once all images trapped in that format are converted to raw IMG and/or HFE.

[Baus]

For reading/writing images from/to disk I use Omniflop in Windows XP

For writing my own samples/wavetables to a Mirage Formatted Diskette I use MDISK and for the EPS-16 Plus I use EPSLIN. Both in Windows XP CMD Prompt.

I don't know how the floppy emulators work. I am still on floppies and SCSI HD's. I love that stuff.

[abruzzi]

For reading/writing images from/to disk I use Omniflop in Windows XP

I was never able to get omniflop to work reading mirage disks. I can write images I download off the net, but if I read, then write the same image, the resulting disk doesn't work.

[Rasputin]

Hmmm.... maybe try the auto-detect format feature? I don't know, I swear by Omniflop on XP. It's been rock solid in my experience, but of course hardware setups may play a part in that.

[abruzzi]

Hmmm.... maybe try the auto-detect format feature? I don't know, I swear by Omniflop on XP. It's been rock solid in my experience, but of course hardware setups may play a part in that.

Yeah, I found this when I was trying to make a backup of the SoundProcess disk I bought from syntaur. I tried everything I could think of, and it wouldn't work. The MASOS, OS3.2, and FMT2 images I downloaded from the net wrote fine, but any disk I read out using omniflop would not make a working disk.

Anyway, mread and mwrite worked. I also just bought a Toughbook on eBay, so hopefully soon I'll have a functional windows/dos PC for disk imaging all the disks I have.

[Rasputin]

Terrific, I'm looking forward to anything you might have.

On an positive note: I'll be posting some more disks here shortly. I've dredged up a fair amount of new stuff, I just need to sort it first. And yes, a good percentage are the library disks, so I have a feeling we'll be able to compile a master set in the near future.

It's so difficult to tell what disks are what though, as there were so many disks put out with duplicate content. One official disk may have Chainsawed Bass as the front of the disk, another at the end, and one may call Fuzz Guitar something else even though it's the same program, etc. Supposedly, the 30 disk Syntaur collection has every single official program, but I'm not 100% convinced of that. But again, unless you want to go through and audition EVERYTHING and compare and catalogue by ear then it's hard to say.

[abruzzi]

I lot of what I have came from another user who was selling a box of 100 mirage disks for $50. There are a lot of ensoniq disks in there, but most are homemade. Lots of audio clips from movies (remember when every local band had a sampler and would trigger their favorite movie lines in the middle of a song?), some oddball gems though.

I'm now always on the lookout for boxes of homemade sample disks, just to see if there is anything interesting in them.

[Rasputin]

I'd be interested in this too. It's surprisingly difficult to get Ensoniq Mirage disks without buying the over-priced ones from Syntaur. There is an eBay seller with an SD card though.

For anyone considering the eBay thing: At the time of this post, the seller likely referenced here (over 200 HFE images in a bundle) doesn't have all the library disks. A good portion of them are the user banks already posted here and a lot of them are duplicates, like the Metasounds disks are in there like 2 or 3 times.

I'll have a better alternative posted here shortly.

Edit: In other words, I have now assembled the fully factory library and have a bunch of extra stuff as well. About the only things of relevance that I can't make available are the additional SoundProcess wavetable sets and parts of the K-Muse London / New York / L.A. sets.

As far as the OP's request goes: I have an EPS16+ and can eventually import the Mirage library into it, so that it can be exported to Kontakt, et al. This will take me some time though, as I have little motivation beyond altruism to contribute to VSE and too many other projects going on.

[Rasputin]

As promised...

http://zine.r-massive.com/ensoniq-mirag ... e-library/

PM me here if there are any problems or questions about accessibility or the exact content.

[abruzzi]

As promised...

http://r-massive.cellarseer.com/ensoniq ... e-library/

PM me here if there are any problems or questions about accessibility or the exact content.

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