29th September 2012
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#1 | | Gear maniac
Joined: Oct 2008 Location: London
Posts: 287
Thread Starter | S950 sampling, 720K Atari disks, and modern PC's
My god old-school sampling is getting tougher by the day... just thought to share some potentially useful info on a recent problem thats been creeping in to view regarding the ability to transfer sound files from the PC over to the Atari and then in to the Akai S950/S900.
Why bother? Well its all about the character really... whilst the S950 is great for quick drum samples etc, its also pretty cool for creating sweeping pads if you upload single-cycle waveforms (think ppg, waldorf, or even 8-bit PCM's etc.). Sure I can use Simpler in Ableton, but it just doesnt sound the same. So I still format 720K DD disks on the PC, and then move the single-cycle waveforms to Steinberg Avalon on the Atart ST. From Avalon, I carry out a midi dump to get sounds in to the S950.
Now, here's the problem - most motherboards will no longer have a floppy controller in order to use a disk drive. In my own case I had to upgrade my motherboard and was presented with the problem of finding an external USB floppy drive. Bought one, and quickly found that it could not read or write to 720K disks. Formatting fails. To make things worse, most of the USB drives you find out there will no longer support older format disks!
I eventually found a Freecom floppy drive that 'claimed' to support 720K disks. But alas this turned out not to be true (at least for DD disks), and was again sent back to the manufacturer for refund.
Finally, I found a website that suggested using the "Dell Latitude D" series of floppy drives. Its an internal drive, but it also has a usb connector for external use. This finally arrived this weekend and I can safely say that it worked absolutely fine with DD disks. At command prompt its a case of typing "format a: /t:80 /n:9" and within minutes I was transfering sounds to the Atari again.
Not sure if this will help anyone, but all I can say is if you're still in to sampling with older-gen equipment then consider getting a USB drive that support DD and HD disks.
Would be useful to draw up a list of usb drives that support older disk formats.
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29th September 2012
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#2 | | Lives for gear
Joined: Sep 2011 Location: Sweden
Posts: 532
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Good info and not entirely unlike my recent experience:
I bought an Atari STE a few months ago to play around with C-lab Creator etc. and I ran into the same problem - my 'modern' (actually 2-3 year old) PC motherboard doesn't even have a floppy connector (and not any Rs-232 ports either  ).
So I went out and bough an USB floppy drive which didn't support DD diskettes (though the product description implied it), searched some more and found a drive by HAMA that works fine.
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29th September 2012
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#3 | | Gear maniac
Joined: Dec 2005 Location: Amsterdam
Posts: 262
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why not use a floppy emulator on your s950?
check it out: HxC2001 HeadQuarters : HxC Floppy Emulator Quote: |
- More than 16000 DD (720KB) Floppy Images on a 32GB SDCard !
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30th September 2012
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#4 | | Gear Head
Joined: Feb 2012
Posts: 64
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Seriously, I just got 2 hxc drives for my mpc60 and emax. It is well worth the $$$.
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30th September 2012
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#5 | | Gear maniac
Joined: Oct 2008 Location: London
Posts: 287
Thread Starter | Quote: |
Seriously, I just got 2 hxc drives for my mpc60 and emax. It is well worth the $$$.
| Thanks guys!
Just been reading about this today - looks awesome and well worth the purchase. My only reservation is that I believe with the S950 I'd need to do a resistor mod on the units motherboard in order for the HxC to have enough power to work as intended. Think I read somewhere that Lotharek can carry out the mod if requested, but this is unconfirmed. I'm just not confident enough with soldering on to circuit boards.
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30th September 2012
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#6 | | Lives for gear
Joined: Aug 2010
Posts: 536
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Yea he can do a mod to the drive, so you don't need to do the resistor swap on the 950 motherboard.. Just get in touch with him before ordering, so he sends the right one.
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2nd October 2012
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#7 | | Lives for gear
Joined: Aug 2011
Posts: 1,547
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a few things.
1) The s950 can use HD disks, all 1.44 MB of them, no need to track down 720K DD disks.
2) You can format the disks on the s950.
3) Why bother going to the trouble of trying to get files from the computer to the 950 by disk? Sample the output of you computer into the s950. The sound of the s950 is more the sampling engine than the filter (which is nice, but not all that flexible).
4) If you must transfer samples from the computer, you can send em by MIDI using samplewrench or some other compatible program.
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4th October 2012
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#8 | | Gear maniac
Joined: Oct 2008 Location: London
Posts: 287
Thread Starter | Quote:
Originally Posted by bluegreengold  a few things.
1) The s950 can use HD disks, all 1.44 MB of them, no need to track down 720K DD disks.
2) You can format the disks on the s950.
3) Why bother going to the trouble of trying to get files from the computer to the 950 by disk? Sample the output of you computer into the s950. The sound of the s950 is more the sampling engine than the filter (which is nice, but not all that flexible).
4) If you must transfer samples from the computer, you can send em by MIDI using samplewrench or some other compatible program. | All very good points -
1) Ahh yes, on the S950 I usually save on to HD disks which are formatted in the machine, but I only use those in order to set up a library of instrument programs so that I can just boot them up when I turn the machine on. Its a shame the S950 opted to use its own drive format.
2) See above.
3) True, depends on the end goal I guess. For drums I typically do this, but most of the time I find myself working with single-cycle wav's (I personally love how the sounds cycle through each output if a voice is in use - I tend to use all of the outputs and route them via a mixer with various pan settings)... the cleanest way to get those single-cycle wav's in to the S950 is to do a midi dump, but I found this troublesome on the PC using Awave, so the Atari route worked without hassle. The problem is that in order for me to transfer from the PC to the Atari I have to use those DD floppies (Atari drive is DD)... so I save *.smp files on a PC formatted DD disk, which can be read in an Atari and finally load them in to Avalon for midi dump. Sounds complex, but its really not... probably takes about 3 minutes.
4) Thanks. I'll try these out... as I say, I tried Awave for sample dumping before but for some reason it always has issues with the machine.
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4th October 2012
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#9 | | Gear nut
Joined: Sep 2012
Posts: 109
| Quote:
Originally Posted by bluegreengold 3) Why bother going to the trouble of trying to get files from the computer to the 950 by disk? Sample the output of you computer into the s950. The sound of the s950 is more the sampling engine than the filter (which is nice, but not all that flexible).
4) If you must transfer samples from the computer, you can send em by MIDI using samplewrench or some other compatible program. | basically agreed, the only thing Id like to do with sending samples back and forth from the s950 is to get an inverted double of the exact sample in the box. I can do that with other samplers, the inverted copy has to be perfectly matched with the original so if they are played at once it doesnt make any sound. With that, the inverted sample's lowpass filter is now useable as a high pass filter for the orginal sample, and the original sample's lowpass filter still works as normal.
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5th October 2012
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#10 | | Gear maniac
Joined: Oct 2008 Location: London
Posts: 287
Thread Starter | Quote:
Originally Posted by bluegreengold 4) If you must transfer samples from the computer, you can send em by MIDI using samplewrench or some other compatible program. | Tried out Sample Wrench for sample dumping - no go... S950 support is only on the Amiga version unfortunately.
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6th October 2012
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#12 | | Gear interested
Joined: Nov 2010
Posts: 28
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You should be able to perform a MIDI sample dump from an Atari program such as Electronic Cow's Squash It! running in an emulator such as STEem Engine on your modern computer.
Using you current disk swapping method you might also be able to use AkaiSeX to skip the MIDI sample dump by transferring disks between the Akai and Atari.
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18th February 2013
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#13 | | Gear interested
Joined: Aug 2006 Location: UK
Posts: 29
| Quote:
Originally Posted by talentless basically agreed, the only thing Id like to do with sending samples back and forth from the s950 is to get an inverted double of the exact sample in the box. I can do that with other samplers, the inverted copy has to be perfectly matched with the original so if they are played at once it doesnt make any sound. With that, the inverted sample's lowpass filter is now useable as a high pass filter for the orginal sample, and the original sample's lowpass filter still works as normal. | Fantastic  | |
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19th February 2013
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#14 | | Gear interested
Joined: Jul 2011 Location: Amsterdam
Posts: 4
| Quote:
Originally Posted by jimelectric Fantastic | I'm gonna give this a try too !
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