BlahBlahCafe - Jean-Michel Jarre forum

Hiiiiiiiiii

My software sampler is driving me mad, I want my sound to have a color, I want to use my samples directly on a machine, I don't want to use a mouse to switch and all !

So, I'm thinking.
I don't have a lot of money to spend, but I'd like to be able to use samples, add effects and so on with an easy machine.

I have found 3 machines :
Roland S330 (nice with its VGA plug and mouse plug !)
Yamaha A3000 (effects seems to be his positive point !)
EMU ESI4000 Turbo (that one seems to be the best !)

I want effects, I want to read my floppy disks and I want it to be easy to use, and all that for less than 200€ !

Tell me what do you think

Regards,
Nico

Nico_Noyau wrote:Tell me what do you think

Save up and get something decent?

You want to Use FLOPPIES?????


If your annoyed with using a PC for sampling,you'll soon get fed up with mountains of Floppies!!!1.44mb!

I've used the Akai S1000/3000XL and got fed up with having to store over 350 Floppy disks,many of which developed Errors etc over time

Your better off if your gonna get a sampler using an external harddrive(usually via SCSI),in which case for the price,you'll better off buying some dedicated software Program that will stream the data direct from your PC

Alot of people who still utilise hardware samplers,tend to keep them for there sound,many of the old Akai 16 bit or 12 bit samplers have a nice grainy sound,but other than that Hardware samplers are a dying breed,and most people don't bother when they can have the software sampler and hard disk storage without much limitation on a PC,its only really the limited storage options for Hardware samplers that have killed them off


In this day and age,you'd be better saving the cash and buying a secondhand Workstation with a sampler built in,but if you can stretch to that,then any of the Akai's from the S1000 Upwards are usuable and easy to use,and you cna pick them up really cheap nowadays,but make sure you get one with some external storage device in the with the sampler if poss

I'm gonna buy a Roland XP80 very soon (maybe next month), but I don't think it has a sampler inside.
Yeah, floppy can be annoying, sure...

But what about SCSI hard disks ?

Save up some money indeed, and buy a second hand MC909 or 808 or sth. That's a drummachine and sampler in one, and you need both!

'kay, so I'll remain on my softwares

If you need to read correctly programs (with samples) designed for the AKAI S Series you can get very cheap an AKAI S3000XL; I got mine 3 years ago for 250 EUR with 32 Mb maximum ram, the multiple outs and S/PDIF are standard like the SCSI port.
Today you can find one for 200 EUR I think. But you don't get effects, unless you find one with the Effect board option (AKAI EB-16) which today can be more expensive than the sampler itself!

You have to get used with AKAIs, my first sampler was a Roland so I never found myself very close to its approach, though these days I have too little time to spend on it, so I admit I use it as a Sample Player only: for that, it does its job very well. I tried some soft sampler which can read AKAI CDs, I have to say that the programs never played the same, I mean the programs with envelopes, filters, velocity, etc.

Than, if you want to start from raw samples to develop synthetic sounds you will know I am gonna name one of the Kurzweil K series with 32 or 64 Mb of RAM.
A K2000R can go for 300 EUR without the Sampling Option and the ROM Expansions.
With the OS 3.87 it reads over SCSI nearly everything formatted on a PC (ok, not the NTFS, but...) you just need the 30 pin RAM for samples -no need for the sampling option- and the K2000 becomes a very powerful sample playback machine with full editing options over the samples.

I never had troubles with floppies luckily, I always used branded Floppies (Sony-TDK-Maxell). The only Kurzweil floppy that became partially unreadable was the Kurzweil Factory Disk ..... (!!!) But they have all their factory sounds on their website, so nothing went lost

I purchased for my K2000 two JAZ drives with 2 New JAZ disks from the US for just $ 15...
The kurzweils can read WAV and AIFF with loop points, AKAI, EMU, Roland CDs... Do I need to say anything else...?

P.

Nico_Noyau wrote:I'm gonna buy a Roland XP80 very soon (maybe next month), but I don't think it has a sampler inside.

No sampler indeed. Save a little bit more and buy a Fantom X ?

Anyway... XP80, great choice. Of course, many useless sounds as on all workstations, but so many possibilities... And some fantastic synth pads

About the sampler... stick with your software. Equinoxe is right about the floppies.

I had an Akai S-2000 one or two years ago. It was a nightmare to use... Actually I only used it once to sample and transpose a chord on electric guitar, I used that sample in a song I never finished, and I turned the sampler off without saving the sample. I sold it a few weeks after.

My idea was to make my personal drumkit into the sampler... It would have been painful. I sampled a drumkit in my Fantom X, and it already takes 4 Mb... That would have made 3 floppies to load everytime I turn the sampler on.

jeremy wrote:Anyway... XP80, great choice. Of course, many useless sounds as on all workstations, but so many possibilities...

Useless, eh?

GeeJee wrote:

jeremy wrote:Anyway... XP80, great choice. Of course, many useless sounds as on all workstations, but so many possibilities...

Useless, eh?

And many more useful sounds of course... I was in a "half-empty glass" mood