Converting my old sample library (Part 1)

Well the Quick Disk drive is all fixed and I've got a brand new MIDI interface for my Windows Vista laptop. Now the real work begins...

The first step was to get System Exclusive (SysEx) dumps of all of my discs onto my laptop hard drive. That way I'm covered if the drive should fail again. Transferring samples via the MIDI cable is quite simple (if somewhat slow) and I decided to use the S-10 Manager software to handle this job. Besides being compatible with the S-220 it has the ability to trigger a sample dump remotely. So this meant less wear and tear on the aged S-220 buttons. The software is a few years old now, and it's a bit quirky in places, but it managed to keep itself together for the whole operation.

Processing all of the non-factory discs went very smoothly. Only one disc error occurred and simply reinserting it solved that issue. Strangely the Roland supplied library discs all failed on side B. I still can't quite work out why this happened as reloading some of the other discs (either side) worked just fine. Either the discs must have degraded (they're 20 years old now!) or I haven't quite put the drive back together properly (i.e. something is out of alignment). This isn't too much of an issue as the SysEx dumps for these discs are available on the Li'l Chips Web Site.

Just for good luck, I decided to test all of the new dump files by sending them back to the S-220 using MIDI-OX (an excellent utility which one can think of as the MIDI Swiss army knife on the Windows platform). Getting the SysEx configuration right took a fair bit of trial and error but I finally settled on these settings:

All of the SysEx dumps reloaded perfectly so that's all of the Quick Disks processed - Wahooo!!!

If you're wondering why I didn't use the S-10 Manager software to reload the samples it's because it doesn't support an external MIDI keyboard. It's a real necessity when you're working with a rack mount module as there is no other easy way to test your sounds. This was probably never written into the application because the Roland S-10 (picture below sourced from vintagesynth.com) has its own keyboard built in.

Now it's onto the task of extracting the sample dumps I've got stored on one of my old Macintosh computers. Even back in the 1990's Quick Disks were relatively rare so I made the conscious decision to avoid using them as much as possible. As a consequence a large percentage of my library is locked up in Performer 4 files. Hopefully it won't be too much of a drama to get those dumps into standard SysEx files on my laptop.

More soon... :)