Ensoniq Mirage sample library?

[elsongs]

Does anyone offer the original Ensoniq Mirage sample library in Konakt format?

[Baus]

You will miss an essential part of the sound when you drop them in Kontakt.

Are you looking for a specific sound (disk)?

[madtheory]

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.

There is a PC program that can converted those discs to WAV, name escapes me now.

You will miss an essential part of the sound when you drop them in Kontakt.

That's debatable. It can be very fruitful to sample on an old machine and then play back in Kontakt.

I do it a lot with the Yamaha TX16W. I've a bunch of Emu II and Fairlight IIx discs that are great in Kontakt. I have some Mirage disks that I converted, and those are quite good too. Unfortunately I don't have a complete set of original disks- the machine I had was all copied disks, badly organised. But I really like the factory piano and the guitar powerchord in Kontakt, sometimes with the Emu SP1200 emulation on, sometimes not. There are various quality settings for the transposing in Kontakt too, which offer a great range of tone. And of course the Time Machine- you can't do that on a Mirage

[Baus]

Yes, very much so, so I won't go there.

I sometimes load Mirage samples into the EPS-16 Plus and they sound great....and they don't sound Mirage.

That being said.... I don't use library disks in the Mirage either. I basically only work with Soundprocess on the Mirage and import my own wavetables/waveforms/wavesamples.

I don't use any software sampler.

[elsongs]

You will miss an essential part of the sound when you drop them in Kontakt.

I know, and I don't care.

Are you looking for a specific sound (disk)?

A few sounds, most specifically the metal clangy sound (Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis used this layered with an Oberheim bass sound for bass lines on Janet Jackson ("Nasty") and New Edition ("If It Isn't Love") records).

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.

[madtheory]

Soundprocess on the Mirage

Awesome

[abruzzi]

I have most of the original mirage disks in mirage format as well as ~100 others. Unfortunately at the moment I haven't gotten setup to rip them to files, so they're all just disks. I've also downloaded a bunch of disks that I've found on the internet. I zipped them up here if anyone wants to play with them:

http://xy.cx/synth/mirage/mirage_disks.zip (about 52mb)

[Rasputin]

I have most of the original mirage disks in mirage format as well as ~100 others. Unfortunately at the moment I haven't gotten setup to rip them to files, so they're all just disks.

I don't know where you're located or if you're willing, but I would happily pay for postage and can rip them out of their tiny 3.5" 440K cages

[abruzzi]

Well, I'm planning to do it, but I need to get a machine with a hard wired floppy and I need to also buy me a HxC floppy for my mirage. Hopefully in the next few months, I also haven't made floppies of all those files I collected, but eventually I'd like to set up a little Mirage archive. A lot of the floppies I have are homemade ones that I bought in a big collection on eBay last year.

[madtheory]

Does it have to be a hard wired floppy? I copied my TX16W library a couple of years ago. Used a Dell USB floppy drive. The only trouble I had was finding one that could read DD disks (most are HD only).

I've no further use for the drive, if you want it?

[abruzzi]

Does it have to be a hard wired floppy? I copied my TX16W library a couple of years ago. Used a Dell USB floppy drive. The only trouble I had was finding one that could read DD disks (most are HD only).

I've no further use for the drive, if you want it?

No, USB floppies (of which I have a few) won't work. My plan is to find an XP laptop with a built in floppy that I can stuff in a closet when I'm not using. Here at work we are decommissioning a bunch of Panasonic Toughbooks that have an option for a floppy. If I can make one of them work, then I'll buy my own (can easily be had for less than $100) and start cranking out the files. I know Syntaur sells copies of the Soundprocess, but I kind of think those should be freely available as well. I don't know if Syntaur holds the rights for distribution or if they're just like all the ebay sellers selling EPROM updates.

[Rasputin]

Does it have to be a hard wired floppy? I copied my TX16W library a couple of years ago. Used a Dell USB floppy drive. The only trouble I had was finding one that could read DD disks (most are HD only).

The only reason it worked with a USB floppy is because TX16W just happens to use a DOS format whereas almost every other sampler uses some proprietary format, as does every Ensoniq floppy device.

[Rasputin]

No, USB floppies (of which I have a few) won't work. My plan is to find an XP laptop with a built in floppy that I can stuff in a closet when I'm not using. Here at work we are decommissioning a bunch of Panasonic Toughbooks that have an option for a floppy. If I can make one of them work, then I'll buy my own (can easily be had for less than $100) and start cranking out the files. I know Syntaur sells copies of the Soundprocess, but I kind of think those should be freely available as well. I don't know if Syntaur holds the rights for distribution or if they're just like all the ebay sellers selling EPROM updates.

I've converted all the commonly available (Mirage-Net, DaDash, Hologram, etc.) EDM and IMG files into HxC/HFE images already and plan on making them available here shortly. Doesn't help with your custom and factory library floppies, but it's a start, as that's what your posted ZIP contains.

As for SoundProcess OS, well, let's just say you should PM me about it.

Update:
As promised:

Not all of them boot, not all of them sound good, and I'm sure there are a couple corrupt/broken images in there somewhere, but they should primarily work and should save a lot of people a lot of grunt work.

[Rasputin]

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.

[madtheory]

The only reason it worked with a USB floppy is because TX16W just happens to use a DOS format whereas almost every other sampler uses some proprietary format, as does every Ensoniq floppy device.

There must be more to it than that though? Does the HxC software do some very low level access on the drive that it can't do over USB?

BTW thanks for those disk images!