emusonacid!

Hello i am new around here, you will probably hear more of me now i am getting back into EMUs as i have just bought a E64.

I am having a little trouble however
and have two questions which need answering (sure i will be back with more soon though).

1.My SCSI cd drive (Yamaha CRW4416SX) shows up when i go to "disk" to search for samples/banks, but if i try and save a bank that i am currently using straight to CD it does not show up. My HD and the floppy drive shows up but not the CDR. Does anybody know why this is?

also

2.What format does the EMU save as? I thought that i would be able to load Wavs/Aiffs onto a C.D from my computer, put the C.D into my SCSI CDR and then load the samples into my EMU.
I have tried this but it says that the CDR has no samples on it.

Is there a way i can do this as i dont have connection to my laptop via SCSI at the moment.

For #2... unfortunately, EOS below version 4.7 can't read a PC format CD over SCSI. It WILL read files from a DOS formatted floppy, but those things are so darn small (of course, I can still remember the days when 20K of memory was a lot, so keep in mind that its all relative).

EOS 4.7 was intended for the Ultra models of the E4 line, and I don't know if it can be installed in older models like the E64 (I haven't tried it with my E6400-classic).

Everybody else is stuck with E-mu's proprietary file system for CD. There are programs like Translator that can write sample CDs on your computer in E-mu's format (or Akai's, etc.), but I'm not sure if it will take straight wave/aiff format from those CDs or if you'd have to have the samples already in a sampler program format (E-mu uses banks of presets, Akai had... uh, well, I don't know actually)

Smaller sample files can be sent via MIDI with MIDI sample dump (if you have a program on your computer that speaks MIDI sample dump), or you can get a SCSI card for your computer and use a program that supports SCSI Musical Data Interchange (SMDI), like Wavelab, SoundForge or ReCycle (note: the most recent version of ReCycle no longer supports SMDI, as they just assumed you'd be doing everything on your computer anyway)

Regarding issue # 1. This is just a guess because I've never tried it myself but I doubt that the sampler is capable of writing back to a CD burner hence the drive showing up when you load samples and banks but not when you try to save them. You will need to save your banks and samples to a SCSI hard drive and if you want to put them on CD use Translator or some similar software to burn an image of the SCSI hard drive to CD.

Cheers,
Adam-V

Thanks for the replies,

I am using a macbook pro, so i will be looking into getting some sort of scsi link if that is possible, i have seen firewire to scsi adaptors but not sure they work in chains (as this macbook only has one firewire 400 and i have a firewire soundcard already in use).

Do you know of any translator programmes for OSX that will burn aiffs/wavs to emu format from a regular OSX CD drive?

i tried chickensys/translator but they dont have thistype of programme for OSX yet.

Thanks

General consensus around here is that firewire/USB to SCSI adapters are not usable for samplers simply because the adapters don;t present the sampler a SCSI device which is what most sample transfer software requires. Do a search for USB to SCSI or Firewire to SCSI for more info, there are a number of threads devoted to these topics.

There was a free SMDI application floating around the net for transferring samples on OSX. The interface was fairly inelegant but it was functional.

As a last resort you could transfer your samples via MIDI but be prepared for long transfer times; it is slooooow.

I run macs in my studio but I have a PC running Sound Forge 8 dedicated for transferring samples to each of my samplers simply because support for SCSI in OSX is not as good as it should be.

Cheers,
Adam-V