emusonacid!

I imported via scsi in my 4.7 EMU, from an external hard disk, a bunch of folders containing Roland s700 programs and samples.

When I backed up the files on a FAT32 scsi disk, and tried reading/copying them on a win98 computer,

I realized that Roland file names contain the following characters: * and :

Windows doen't allow for these characters in file names, and that made impossibile for me to further manage the files (changing directories, backup on separate disks, etc)

Are those character essential to the good functioning of Roland samples/programs (on a EMU), or can the files be renamed?

May I just replace [manually] * with x, and : with y, or are those signs relevant to some function?

Thanks in advance

I would imagine that provided the Roland files with the characters: * and : are before the . (eg ping *.wav or whatever) then it will make no difference, because it is just the file name that you will change and not the file type. So if the emu read it before the name change it will read it afterwards providing it is seeing the same file type.
Hope this makes sense.

Just a thought

If the roland banks contain these characters then there should be no problems renaming, but if the sounds (ie individual samples) contain these symbols it might tell the Roland or emu EOS that the sample is assigned left or right as half of a stereo sample.

As I say bank name changes shouldn't mater, and as only this name would be seen by the pc it would not mater if individual samples are named with odd charecters inside the shell of the bank, as the PC will only see the shell name I guess

You could always load them up rename them and save them as emu format
I find that Roland samples load really slowly because of the translation process but are fine once they are saved in emu format

JAHFUNK wrote:
As I say bank name changes shouldn't mater, and as only this name would be seen by the pc it would not mater if individual samples are named with odd charecters inside the shell of the bank, as the PC will only see the shell name I guess

I see.

My suspect was the following: that there might be some necessary coherence between patch name and sample names, and that editing the ones could disrupt references,

but you are telling the BANK NAME has no relevance in this case.

That makes sense.

I will make a copy and try batch-renaming the files.

will post here positive or negative results.



because

Ok, here's some facts.

Hope this will help future users.

Question was:

Roland 700 samples/banks loaded on a FAT formatted EOS disk can't be copied to a Windows computer because their names contain illegal characters ("*" and ":").

Files are SEEN by win98 if the hd disk is connected to a computer, but can't be managed, copied, saved, edited.

Windows won't even allow renaming them.

Answer is:

The problem can be solved.

Those characters CAN be removed, by [and ONLY by] loading the bank into the EMU and saving it with a different name.

I used dashes ( - ) in place of both columns and stars ( : and * ), and it worked.

From there, I could move the files from the EMU's scsi hard disk to a win98 computer, from there to a USB drive, and then export/backup them.

Thx for the hints.

Next.

How did you get these onto the hard disk in the first place? You mean you were copying e4b bank files that are actually Roland files saved in EMU format? Or are the Roland files in some other format that the EMU happens to be able to read?

I'm thinking what you did is pop in a Roland CDROM into the EMU, then load everything and save it as EMU format onto the hard drive. And the illegal characters got copied in the e4b file names. Right?

I just tried loading up an S-7 series floppy diskette and the EMU won't read it. It'll read the CDROMs though, but I'm thinking it has to be saved in EMU format, and sometimes they can contain those illegal characters. The same thing happened with my EIIIx CDs. I had to put my hard drive back into my EMU and rename all of the / slashes to be able to change the filenames for reordering.