As the year nears an end, I spent much of the time recently working on my setup over making new music.
Specifically, last night I finally managed to get a CompactFlash card reader working with my Emax II sampler after a few days of failure. Turns out I had to modify jumper settings in the circuitry of the card reader, and even then, not all SCSI ID's will be accepted by the sampler.
Now the question becomes: how to transfer sounds to and from the Emax II? The CompactFlash reader is meant in my setup as a modern workaround over failure-prone zip drives, and provided I don't write excessively to the card (the only major drawback I've heard of is eventual write failure), it should be all golden for quite a while. It got complicated when it comes to the computer end; since the card was not traditionally formatted, it wouldn't mount or be read conventionally. Thank goodness I learned a bit of UNIX commands earlier on, because use of the dd command managed to circumvent the problem of transferring to and from the card reader for my computer.
My only major gripe with this process, other than how time-consuming it is: while I am able to convert Emulator II banks to the Emax, the sounds are a relatively low volume and sometimes have significant DC offset, the latter of which isn't corrected in the Emax II's audio output without a significant pop.
Course, it may be best I make custom banks of sounds for it, anyway. The Emulator II was only capable of 512 KB of 8-bit samples in a bank, which converts into 1 MB of 16-bit samples. My particular Emax II, however, can hold up to 2 MB per bank, and the card I'm using, while the format is limited to 100 banks, can hold up to 1 GB of data. In other words, I can cram a bit more sample data into a bank than for the Emulator II, and since there's a 100 bank limit per external storage, why not?
Unfortunately, this means a lot of custom bank-making, which, in turn, means a lot of time spent on this if I'm going to get anywhere with my Emax II without messing around with the tiny buttons on its front display.
Specifically, last night I finally managed to get a CompactFlash card reader working with my Emax II sampler after a few days of failure. Turns out I had to modify jumper settings in the circuitry of the card reader, and even then, not all SCSI ID's will be accepted by the sampler.
Now the question becomes: how to transfer sounds to and from the Emax II? The CompactFlash reader is meant in my setup as a modern workaround over failure-prone zip drives, and provided I don't write excessively to the card (the only major drawback I've heard of is eventual write failure), it should be all golden for quite a while. It got complicated when it comes to the computer end; since the card was not traditionally formatted, it wouldn't mount or be read conventionally. Thank goodness I learned a bit of UNIX commands earlier on, because use of the dd command managed to circumvent the problem of transferring to and from the card reader for my computer.
My only major gripe with this process, other than how time-consuming it is: while I am able to convert Emulator II banks to the Emax, the sounds are a relatively low volume and sometimes have significant DC offset, the latter of which isn't corrected in the Emax II's audio output without a significant pop.
Course, it may be best I make custom banks of sounds for it, anyway. The Emulator II was only capable of 512 KB of 8-bit samples in a bank, which converts into 1 MB of 16-bit samples. My particular Emax II, however, can hold up to 2 MB per bank, and the card I'm using, while the format is limited to 100 banks, can hold up to 1 GB of data. In other words, I can cram a bit more sample data into a bank than for the Emulator II, and since there's a 100 bank limit per external storage, why not?
Unfortunately, this means a lot of custom bank-making, which, in turn, means a lot of time spent on this if I'm going to get anywhere with my Emax II without messing around with the tiny buttons on its front display.
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