emusonacid! legacy

I just spoke with someone at EMU the other day. They cleared up some of the rumors that have been floating around regarding them in the past year or so. First. The EOS soft sampler will happen. It is a priority for them. They are aware of the growing competition from that sector and recognize that is where sampling is right now. Emu has been a hardware company since analog oscillators. Nowadays that hardware is just a means of hosting what we interface as the sampler. The software. The writting is on the wall and they are taking notes. I was told the EOS software sampler should be introduced in the third or fourth quarter this year. One rumor that unfortunately looks like it may not happen is a USB card for the current EOS ultra samplers. Emu engineering made a prototype and even showed it off at one point but there is no internal announcment that it is on the schedule. Maybe it will happen at a later date if the soft sampler comes out and is succesful. This does not leave the hardware in the obsolete pile. Currently running a software sampler as powerful as an E4ultra on a contemporary computer alongside all the other audio applications is asking a bit too much as is being experienced by those presently attempting to do so. Emu predicted that in the next 2 years or so that won't be much of a problem as processing horsepower increases. At that time the hardware sampler may be put to pasture. For now the EOS hardware sampler still very much has it's place and may in the future. The current additon of FAT32 file formats will make it possible to have identical instrument files for both the soft and hardware samplers. This way you can save entire soft sampler instruments that can be loaded into the hardware sampler and vice versa. The suggested method of this would be via a removable media drive or trasferring a scsi drive. The USB card sure would be nice for those dumps. This would allow you to offload some of the sampler duties to the hardware sampler in the studio or a way to transfer what is done in the studio to something a little better suited for live work. At this time none or all of this may come to pass or in the way described. I have no affiliation with emu other than being a longtime user. The person I spoke with wasn't a behind the scenes business or technology developer, just someone who deals with us users and was willing to talk about what could be openly divulged. What was told to me was not from confidential internal EMU information but what was related to me as general company direction and some internal product anouncements. The only thing I got as being a present reality is EOS 4.7. Many have used this beta that was available from an internal EMU ftp site. The only reason it wasn't released was some sort of compatibility bug with instruments created on previous os's. That being cleared up it should be available any time now. I was even emailed it in lieu of it not being on the EMU site yet. In finishing there had been some rumors that EMU was in trouble and was closing down. Since the introduction of the RFX card there has been little forward movement or news from EMU. Even their site seems to be somewhat static and out of date at times. I'm sure they have felt the effects of the current economy and the general shift to software instruments. It does however seem that they aren't shrinking away just yet. They may emerge though in a new direction and hopefully sounding as well as they did in the past.

Wow thanks for the info. Looking forward to interfacing the ultra hardware with the soft sampler (i hope!), for now tons of stuff still to learn on the hardware

Mmm. I remember a friend who worked in turnkey telling me of an Emu rep saying the ultra was going to be the last hardware sampler back when the Ultra first came out. Not really surprised by your revelations. Softsampler will probably come at some point but considering they have been talking about it since around millenium time you have to be a little sceptical about it.

Would be nice though

I take solice in that the soft samplers will not have the EMU inputs. The filters, maybe .... but not the inputs .... you can't have my inputs you bastard!

Sorry for the unintelligible rant.

yea they've been working on that softsampler forever.

everything is going software (dang, even i just ordered logic 6, reaktor 4, and kontakt last week) but i love my e4xt because:

1: it sounds fucking bad ass
2: it has amazing DAC's
3: z plane filters
4: horsepower to get shitloads of sounds going at once, all being modulated, without draining the cpu on my tibook
5: i'm sort of used to it and thus can do things with it (there's a big learning curve with every piece of gear this deep/capable, so once you learn enough to be productive with it, it's good to stick with it)
6: uh, all my sample cd's are emu format
7: even though i'm not one of those "i don't want to stare at a computer to make music all day" people it is nice to actually turn to a music-only computer (the sampler) to make music. it feels more like an instrument. perhaps this is dumb but whatever.
8: the rfx card is godly.
9: it is flexible in ways software samplers are not (though in all fairness software samplers are flexible in even more, yet also different ways to where they still win out on flexibility)
10: you can SAMPLE with the hardware sampler. this is a big stupid fuck up of software samplers in my opinion. they should be able to sample if they are to be called a sampler. otherwise i don't know, call them "sample playback and arranger devices" or whatever.

so i'll probably always use the e4xt. it's kind of cool that if and when they discontinue hardware samplers altogether i will always still have the most powerfull last generation ones. i have a feeling the ultra's will be sought after in the future the same way 808's, 909's, 303's, and old analog synths are now. though if emu faithfully recreates the z plane filters for the g5 and x86 it will go a long way towards decreasing their future vaule.

the depressing thing is, and i don't know if any of you have checked this out recently or knew this but ultra's go for JACK SHIT on the used market right now. i see e4xt's on ebay for like $350 and shit. it's ridiculous. oh well. people don't know what they're missing.

Agreed on all accounts, but especially:

2: it has amazing DAC's [and ADC's]

A BIG part of the sound, and one that is unlikely ever to be emulated. Assuming the E5 comes along, it will kill on a G5, and if they get the filters right will be deadly. BUT it won't sound *quite* like an Emu, will it?

Klaseed wrote:Agreed on all accounts, but especially:

2: it has amazing DAC's [and ADC's]

A BIG part of the sound, and one that is unlikely ever to be emulated. Assuming the E5 comes along, it will kill on a G5, and if they get the filters right will be deadly. BUT it won't sound *quite* like an Emu, will it?

depends, you know? you never know, they wrote the damn filters in the first place, all they have to do is change the system architecture, which of course is no small task but they already created the bad ass sounding filters, they just have to make them run on other processors.

and the g5 desktops have digital out's and stuff, one thing i'd most like to see (especially in powerbooks) is better DAC's/outputs, like 2 1/4" out's with emu quality DAC's and g5 processors in them would a bad ass laptop make.

ooh, imagine if emu released a 64 bit softsampler for the g5, but they won't because they have a retarded windows-bias. they'll release the softsampler for x86 and make us mac users wait a couple years for a mac port. bastards.

since I started this thread on an optomistic note after speaking with an EMU employee I feel I gotta revisit it. Well it's certainly the last part of the 4th quarter of this year. Still no new anything from EMU least of all the EOS5. I'm not trying to be pessimistic but I don't think we'll see anything more from them. I have no info in that direction other than their silence in the marketplace for so long. I think the EOS is now in the obsolete bin. Not in capability just that it's dead in development. What I really hope could happen would be for them to sort of open the doors on the emulator and make it open source. Let 3rd parties who still use and want to keep them going make all the things we want to keep our EMU's working in the current studio environment. Hell NED's Synclavier still has some 3rd party support. They ported an interface to the mac, added midi and all that. I think EMU or those that control EMU would have to give up the ghost and let that happen. Not likely. Creative as big and dumb as they are will still probably see some value in the name and assets and hold on to it in the hopes that they can canabalize some of the technology or sell it off. Anyway. The EOS is now a classic IMO. Hopefully something will come along to replace it but for now it stays put next to the G5.

Same series of events happened with the TB-303. When they were first taken off the market the prices dropped to small change. To get that authentic sound today they cost $800-$1000.
So maybe the Emu owners are ahead of the game? Maybe years from now they'll be harcore enthusiast trying to obtain that sound (those of us that own 1 know its power ; ).
As of late I been shopping around for new gear at different retailers. Not one shop had an EIV in any form. Talking to a sales rep,
"We can still get them but they've been brutaly defeated by software samplers. Most people who want a sampler just need it to play their samples midi. They don't use alot of the hidden features. They still come on special request from people that know what a real sampler does. But we don't stock them cause they aren't sellling."

Yeah. I'm holding on to mine because I know at this moment I can't quite replace it with any single or multiple items and get as good of results. Reaktor is very flexible and can do a lot of the tricky stuff you can do with the EOS but doesn't nearly sound as good. I also have the EXS sampler for logic which also doesn't sound like the EMU and is pitifully constrained in it's flexibility. It's too bad EMU didn't give it that one last bit that would make these samplers integrate with current setups. They almost got there. They had a USB card prototype and EOS soft they demo'd a couple years ago. It seems like they really blew their load with the RFX and it's I/O options. The RFX is a monster. Amazing. A lot of work went into that. They obviously released that just as the soft samplers were taking off. I can imagine the bean counters rage as they saw no real returns on that R&D. All I wish is that some day they release some of the technology to the public and let the EOS be a user supported open source type of thing. There are a lot of talented people who could pick up the ball and offer that final inch to make these EMUs current.