emusonacid!

hello there

having been a fan of emu samplers since i worked fairly intensively with an e64000 ultra about ten years ago i jumped at the chance to get hold of an e5000 ultra a few days ago.

this thing is gorgeous, it's barely been touched, the guy i bought it from came into some cash a while back and decided to become a musician but got bored quickly so it's been sat in it's box for a good few years :-)

i've spent a few hours mucking about with it, re-learning how to make patches and having fun with loops etc. i knew the filters would be awesome having used the 6400 but what i'd forgotten about was how much fun it is to cut samples up and have fun messing about with them. i have soft samplers but i'm so used to doing everything in cubase these days that i just don't bother.

so anyway, i have a few questions for those of you who know a bit about this machine:

firstly, it has 128mb of ram, is that the limit?

secondly, it has a 10gb hard drive (which sounds like a bleeding jumbo landing) can this be upgraded? and if so is what are the specifics of the drive i need to get? and is there a nice quiet one on the market?

and finally, what are the options for upgrading the bits on the back? i feel that if i'm gonna get some meaningful work done with this thing i'd like to get more outputs and i'm gutted that i can't hook an ascii keyboard up to it. what do i need and, more importantly, where can i get the bits?

any help much appreciated

cheers

terry

Not totally sure on the hard drives but others on here will be able to help..

128mb is the maximum amount of RAM as far as i know, the expansions turn up for sale on this forum sometimes and also eBay. Not cheap though!

cheers

i just noticed the front page of this site, lots of handy info there

i'm thinking the first thing i need to do is get as big a hard drive as is possible and then get a scsi port for my computer

are any of the expansion boards still sold brand new or is it an ebay job? not finding much on there sadly

I dont think any new expansions are left now, there was an American ebay seller who had some new ones for sale a while back, old stock found in a warehouse i think.

best bet is to find the part numbers of the bits you want and set up a saved search on ebay, so you'll get an email whenever a matching item is listed.

At one point i was wanting the ADAT expansion and saw a few turn up on ebay but they were expensive.

An other option is to find another sampler on ebay thats already loaded with the bits, buy it and build one super EMU from the 2

yeah, i've been thinking along the lines of trying to find a cheap(ish) ultra with the whistles and bells and cannibalising it. although it may have made more sense to just find one that's pimped out already and not bothered buying the one i have, hahaa.

right now i'm just reading through all the old threads in the forum trying to find as much info as i can. first things first i need to get some scsi action in my computer.

i've noticed that the adaptec scsi pci cards are recommended, but does anybody know if the pcmcia scsi cards also work with ultras? i'm thinking i'd rather interface with the sampler via my laptop

Sorry no idea on the pcmcia scsi cards

Ive got one of those Adaptec scsi pci cards but found it a pain due to the cable which connects it to the EMU being about 1ft long!
As far as i know there are no longer cables, anyone know different?

You can send mono samples by midi though, its slower but nothing too bad unless its some massive multisample

I mostly record into the emu, either from vinyl or my computer. The emu A/D process does colour the sound but in a good way, after all im sure that sound is the reason most of us on here use them.

If you have an scsi cd drive for your sampler i think you can burn off cd's full of samples in emu format using a program called Chicken systems translator.. i'd like to know more about this actually

Congratulations on the Ultra! regarding the hard drive noise, this has been driving me insane. mine has a 20gb hard drive in it that makes the whole case vibrate and sound like a big hairdryer. a cheap way to go would be a barracuda hdd or similar which will reduce noise considerably. i however would prefer NO noise at all, so i'm in the process of installing an 8gb transcend ssd in my ultra, as well as changing the relatively noisy psu fan with a scythe mini-kaze silent fan.

MR-F there are longer scsi cables, I have a three metre one hooked up works fine - check out ebay.

Just a tip that might come in useful - you can stop the hard drive noise whilst you're playing, by going to disk > info > sleep. This effectively switches off the hard disk, so it won't make any row. The hard disk automatically 'wakes-up' again when you need it.

thats cool maybe you can make an assignable key on the front panel for that disk shut down.!! i saw a list somewhere for assingments , cant remember where though:/