Converting my old sample library (Part 2)

It's been a very busy week at this end but (at last) I've found some more time to work on converting my sample library. After the successful conversion of all the Quick Disks to System Exclusive (SysEx) dumps I was inspired to attempt the conversion of some of the sample dumps hidden inside of the 80+ MOTU Performer 4 files I have sitting on my Power Mac's hard drive.

Unfortunately there seemed to be some kind of problem sending SysEx data directly from Performer so I decided to investigate saving each sequence as a Standard MIDI File. This worked well and I was able to FTP the converted file to my laptop and then send the dump safely back to the sampler with a MIDI file player. A quick search of the internet revealed a command line utility (called getsysex) for extracting the SysEx data directly from the converted file. With all my samples in SysEx format I'll be able to easily extract the raw WAV files for importing into Ableton Sampler.

This video shows the steps I'm going to have to follow, on both the Mac and PC, to convert each file:


I stopped the recording once the sample dump had started as it takes a few minutes and is rather boring to watch. In this case the dump arrived safely.

So that's 1 file down and only 79 more to go :D