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

Ableton Orchestral Instrument Collection

For years I've had an interest in making what I call "Orchestral Music" using samplers or sample based synths. When I saw this video recently, on the Ableton web site, it became an obsession!!!



I haven't managed to get my hands on this product yet. To be honest I had been similarly impressed with the Vienna Symphonic Library. Especially since I heard that most of the incidental music for the first season of the new Doctor Who series was done with the VSL using Apple's Logic. I had no idea and had assumed that they used a real orchestra!

It's astounding how far they've come with this sampling technology and both Ableton's and VSL's products look seriously amazing. However I think I've decided to go with the Orchestral Instrument Collection (oic).

It's not because I'm an "Ableton Boy"... it's got to do with work flow. Since I don't have the opportunity to work on my music full time I really have to be organised. The major appeal of Live is that I can sit down and start working straight away. Make a few MIDI tracks, drag in a few instruments, and I'm composing. Similarly if I'm in sound design mode I can make up a new instrument rack and drop in some virtual instruments, samples, effects and I'm on the way. My music time is limited and this makes effective use of that time. Back when I had a full synth rig I could spend up to an hour configuring the synths and then saving the setup data so I could continue working the next day. No wonder things went so slowly. The oic integrates directly into what they call the "Ableton Work Flow". Essentially the oic is just another bunch of instruments and that really appeals.

For now I shall have to be content to drool but I'm really looking forward to the day when I can start trying to compose in this "orchestral mode". It's going to be a real challenge but I'm sure the results will make it worth while.

Can one ever have too many synths?

This guy obviously doesn't think so. Check out this amazing collection of gear in action:



I found this video in Synth.nl's favourite list on YouTube (thanks Michel).

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... :)

Fixing my Roland S-220 sampler floppy drive

This lovely piece of gear (circa 1987) was my very first sampler. I purchased it second hand in 1992 so it was borderline "vintage gear" even back then. Alas its 30KHz at 4 sec maximum sampling capacity was no match for the crisp sounds in my Roland JV-80 but it was fantastic to learn sampling on. It also taught me just how much of a difference having your own sounds can make on a track.



So you can imagine my utter horror when I turned it on recently (after many years of sitting in a rack case in storage) and heard this horrible continuous grinding noise. And I hadn't even plugged it into the mixer!!! Just between you and me this baby is one of my prized possessions so it was quite a tough decision to get out the screwdriver. Especially since I have a history of not being able to put stuff back together.



After a little research I discovered that the floppy drive is usually the first thing to go in equipment of this age group. Mainly because the drives were belt driven. This was the case for my sampler but with a twist! The belt had managed to fuse itself to just about anything it could find. In the picture above you can see that it's melted all over the main fly wheel.



With a little patience and a bunch of cotton tips I managed to clean the remains of the belt off ok. The next trick was finding a suitable replacement for the belt. Working out exactly what to use has been a little difficult but I'd read that video player belts make good replacements in the drives of other synths (such as the Yamaha SY-85). Unfortunately I haven't been able to track one down yet so I've put this orange rubber-band in as a temporary measure.

Amazingly it's working really well now. All of my quick discs load without a glitch so I've finally able to get all my old samples onto my laptop in SysEx format. Converting them to wav files should be a simple matter of using one of the utilities from the Roland S-10 Manager software package. I'm hoping that I can use that package to copy and paste settings, like loops points and key assignments, into Ableton Sampler.

My old sample library will be revived in all it's awesome lo-fi-ness! This time, however, it'll get the star treatment with Live 7's awesome effects! Can't wait! Will let you know how it goes.