emusonacid!

While we all love our EMU samplers we can all admit their days are numbered. I believe our sampler can have a much longer life span but some thing are going to have to happen, EMU has to make it happen. 1) we must have a USB card like the Akai sampler to interface with our computers and a powerful program/sampler editor like Akai Sys. 2) the upgrade are just to expensive< how EMU warrants those prices without a word for continuing support is outrageous. If these samplers are going to survive, lowering the price on the upgrades would encourge us to keep/use our samplers. For Emu to try to milk us for more dollars when the writing is on the wall for hardware units should not happen, what do you say?, knocking 25-30% off the price of these upgrades would do alot to extended the life of our samplers. So, if you had just one option which would it be, USB card w/ program/sample editor or A price reduction in the upgrade pricing. Let the polling begin!!!!

I think reductions on the upgrades should now be made. I get the impression the way they see it is 'Thankyou for buying our product, we will now sting you for any options you may need!'. Maybe I'm still bitter about the recent price plunge

The upgrades are WELL overpriced. The RFX seems to be about ?450 new when the sampler itself (E5000) is selling for ?399 - that's crazy. Never mind 25% they need to knock about 50% off.

c'mon people!!!!! let emu hear your voice, without it, the future for our samplers are pretty bleek.

i think both things should happen. the usb interface, and the price drop in options too. that is why i haven't boughten the rfx thing, because it is damn near a thousand dollars.

i think that those of us that have emu samplers might very well have the next tr808's of the new century. think about it. people are still dieing to get thier hands on a tb 303 or tr808. we could very well have something that poeple will look for later on. and of course there are still hardware junkies out there too. i know i am one of them..

word up S&H. The emu's will go back up in price soon enough. hehe

I'm definately down with the lower price for the upgrades. I mean, shit, right now I could buy a new e6400 for the same price as the 8+ output and rfx upgrade. That's rediculous. The usb thing would be nice as well, but I would much rather be able to afford the rfx and output options.

great posts so far, those of you that did post seem to be interested in the price reduction for the upgrades, but let me play devils advocate, i want you to think also about the usb interface and software for editing and programing, at this point with everything becoming more intergrated with our computers wouldnt you say thats more important. i mean there are many plug-ins that can do the same thing or can they, most of us dont have the upgrade options especially the rfx board. that means we really dont know how good it is, and no one is posting anything about the rfx board so its still somewhat of a mistery to most of us, so is it worth the gamble with todays plug in processing power? what do think?

i do all my sound editting on my emu anyway. and to tell you the truth, i don't trust computers all that much, they aren't stable. think of it this way. you have the emu sampler, every componet has been completely tested for stablity. you buy a computer and it may never work right because of all the different variables that go into computers. what if you get a sound card that doesn't give with a program, then the computer doesn't work proper. unfortunately, the whole thing with microsoft and the monopoly thing is going to make things even worse. for computers to be stable there needs to be a standard, and unfortantely for pc, microsoft is the standard, not a monopoly, that is why nothing works all that well on pc, or macs for that matter, because companies do thier own thing, try to make a product that will work with a large number a variables, i guess it all comes back to the old cliche, you can only please some of the people some of the time, i guess the cards, and ram, and programs only work some of the time. i personally haven't had any problems with my windows, but some people do, i beleive alot of that is because if you get a commercial computer, like dell, or gateway, the get in and fuck with the source code, so you can get those advertisements and shit. the more you add to something the more likely it is to fail.

could it be useful to have software editing capabilties for the emu, sure. but i am getting everything i need from that unit on it's own right now and i don't see a place for it right, for me. but i grew up doing hardware i guess you could say. i did soft ware for about a year and found it to be to memory consuming and time consuming also. and i found that the hardware sampler made things so much faster.

should they do something like you are suggesting. you bet. but i may not be the first to line up for it. but that is me. and every one needs something different.

s & h, you say you hae a pc, if thats true you have to admit ediing on a computer is so much easier. have you seen akai sys? all you're doing is remote editing via the computer you still use the samplers programming features like the filters and such. also are you saying computer plug-ins are not on par with rfx board? i have a macintosh, and i rarely have a problem with my computer, most of the time the problem is not having a machine not optimized for audio. you just cant take these off the shelf pc's and think its going to work flawlessly. have you checked out the custom pc? its not that much more expensie that the ones you find in your local retail store, i think that if more user bought those types of pc's the problems would be minimum. remember how many post have we seen stating any detailed info on the options like the rfx board. we seem to be putting alot of faith in something we havent seen or heard. which is why alot of users have'nt bought them. i think that if the rfx board was that great most of us would have bought it no matter the cost. therefore i think being able to intergrate you samplers into out computer via usb is much more important, but thats just my opinoin. i sent a email to emu about this very subject, i recieved a reply stating the e5 soft sampler will happen this fall, but no mention of a usb card. KEEP THE POSTS COMMING!!!!

actualy, my uncle built my pc, and so it works great. working in audio in cakewalk is fine, but i also find that i can do the same with my sampler. and what i mean by that is this:

as for plug in's, i haven't really heard plug in's, or even the rfx board to really know what sounds better. the reason why i don't have the rfx, is because when i got there little thing in the mail about a year or two ago, i had the impression it wasn't for my sampler. so i really never looked into it. also being it the price of a new sampler really makes it hard to think about getting one. thus the price cut.

most of my experiance with software comes from pro audio 8, and at the time, three years ago? i don't remember, i really didn't know about all these other programs, and for all i know they may not have even existed. i know that with some of the effects i have in pro audio, like the flanges, can sound good, if in mono, but you do stereo, for some reason, they clip... and i also discovered that i couldn't get real time control over the effects, or at least i couldn't figure it out and i could only timestretch vocals, sometimes, every once in awhile. if i even slightly timestretch a drum sample it sounded weird. a trend that has carried on to sonar. that is why i went the sampler route, i wanted something with control and something that would speed things up, something that i knew everything would work, and work right. working in audio is very slow, atleast with cakewalk, i have to chop up my samples every time i want to add or subtract an event, then i have to place it and do it again. i find just everything triggering from my sampler is much faster and not as taxing on harddrive space. but i will say that recording everthing over to audio does improve the sound greatly. and with plug ins and other software stuff like that coming out now, they have improved alot over what i could get three or four years ago. and if i need to i might go for a software effects package in the end, since it is cheaper. and might sound just as good if not better then an 800 dollar board for our samplers. but i am happy with my emu right now as it is.

like i said before, i think a sound editor would be great on the software side, that would interface with the emu. but it would have to have stuff that i can't do on my emu, or it would be just a reduntant system... the akia system sound cool, but does it work with emu? from what you say it sounds like you can make your edits without transfering samples back and forth, and if i understand that right, then that would be something that i would more likely go for. but i find that i am gravitating more over to hardware every day. i am seriously considering getting a hardware paramtric eq, and graphic eq, so i can play the song through them and actually hear what is going on in the sound, in real time. i know there is software that will do this, but i don't know of any that can work with cakewalk, and since my computer is old i don't want to take the time to have to convert 70 or 80 megs over to a different format just to use a real time parametric eq. maybe i should look into more software stuff that can work with cakewalk, i don't know...

as for my computer; it works good, but i understand that the more complicated a system is the more like it is to have something wrong, or go wrong with it. that is why my computer only has cakewalk on it, nothing else, no games no internet, nothing. why, because when you load another program into your computer, they can sometimes cause problems, because maybe the set up for your sound card isn't right for your new program so in order for it to work right, it has to change that property, and then your old program doesn't work, or doesn't work as well because the new program fucked it up. that i what i am talking about. i have actually had that happen to my computer and i had to fdisc it just to get things back, because of course the program i added inbedded it's self in other files that i couldn't get rid of. the whole software side is kind of a gamble, they are trying to make something that will work in an unknown. my computer is different from your computer and yours is different from your friends and so on. so a program that will work for you may not work for mine, but will work better for your friends. that happens sometimes. the chances are they will work, but i guess i am just scared to have it go wrong and then spend the next two hours fdiscing and reloading the os again.

i hear ya sampleandhold, most of your fears i assume are caused by not making the leap head on into a full computer based setup, but its one your going to have to make as support and development for our hardware samplers diminish to nothing. that was one of the reasons i started this post if emu wishes to keep a loyal customer base they need to do right by us. one, they need to lower the prices on the options for our samplers, two, we must have a usb card and sampler/prgram editor like akai has, three, a software update for our samplers is in order, they need to get rid of the beat munging and replace it with a beat slicer and we should be able to save individual programs to a bank, and not the current meathod which requires us to load a whole bank load the program we want then replace the old saved bank with a new bank, if these chages are made when emu comes out with their e5 soft sampler they will have a loyal customer base but if not i see no reason why any of us would ever buy a emu product again, seeing that they left us high and dry on this investment.