emusonacid! legacy

Well, just threw my 2 cents at E-mu about releasing the source for EOS (but I live in Canada, so it's actually closer to 5 cents Canadian)

Also asked the impertinent question about whether E-mu will ever release another stand-alone hardware unit (dammit, I'm sick of software intruments!)
Pipe dream, I'm sure, but it sure would be nice to have an Emulator 5 to throw in a rack (is it just me, or are hardware units just so much more robust than the average PC?), especially if it were backward compatable with all of the previous generations of Emulator (and the X/X2). Drool as you imagine an Emulator built around a dedicated (rather than sharing processing time with tax management software and iTunes) multi-GHz processor instead of a 33MHz one... up to 2Gb of dedicated sample RAM... transform multiplication fast enough you don't forget what you were working on by the time it's finished processing!

Mmm... hardware heaven...

I think the problem it is just "too expensively" to build a new E5 XT ( or what ever it would be called).

They can do it!...but it?s more cheaply to develop , built and "Sell" on Cumputers etc


...but dream dream dream...i still stay on my Emu?s..

Well, so much for that idea...

I got a reply back today to my e-mail to E-mu (at least they're prompt). Here's what they had to say...

Our EOS software for our legacy hardware samplers is the result of
thousands of engineering man hours and is not likely ever going to be
sold or released to the public.

While we understand the love from our legacy customers for our hardware
samplers, and we don't like to say never, E-MU is out of the hardware
sampler business for the foreseeable future.

Sigh... it's the "not likely to be sold" part about EOS that gets me. You'd think they might at least be interested in licensing the damn thing for somebody to do a proper re-work on.

Oh well... now I'll just have to get rich and buy E-mu Systems out from under Creative Labs...

vermis_rex wrote:Well, so much for that idea...

I got a reply back today to my e-mail to E-mu (at least they're prompt). Here's what they had to say...

Our EOS software for our legacy hardware samplers is the result of
thousands of engineering man hours and is not likely ever going to be
sold or released to the public.

While we understand the love from our legacy customers for our hardware
samplers, and we don't like to say never, E-MU is out of the hardware
sampler business for the foreseeable future.

Sigh... it's the "not likely to be sold" part about EOS that gets me. You'd think they might at least be interested in licensing the damn thing for somebody to do a proper re-work on.

Oh well... now I'll just have to get rich and buy E-mu Systems out from under Creative Labs...

my reply was more along the lines of "sorry no info on giving out eos in the future"

so hearing this reply makes me very sad

thanks for ruining a great company creative

Not to defend Creative, but to a certain extent it does make a sort of business sense. The move from having to custom design their own hardware AND software to using a standardized platform (PC/WinXP) and only having to design the software is entirely logical in terms of maximizing your resources. It just doesn't help the rest of us who like hardware.

Software is king (for now), and any company that doesn't follow the will of the masses gets dropped in the ditch.

The next time we'll see hardware rack samplers in prominent market position will be when they start building little single purpose mini-PCs to run the softare on, with the OS stripped of any other functions or multi-program support. Still using a standardized hardware base, in a custom case or form-factor, and running the company branded standard-base-OS and custom developed DSP software. They'll have control over exactly how the "standard" platform is configured, rather then the mess sofware developers face these days where they can't predict what specific hardware will be running their program. They'll have a stable program running on a stable hardware platform that will outperform a general PC based product like Emulator X (in a professional/road setting), and can get back into both sides of the market (which, in a way, they are with stuff like the 1820 sound card/box... they jsut can't control what other crap we run on our PC, or how the various flavour of video driver will react to their software, or ... well, you get the idea).

So, from a business sense, we can't really fault Creative. They have to keep an eye on the bottom line, or they go out of business (and maybe take E-mu into the abyss with them). And given the investment that the EOS represents, and combined with the investment represented by the current direction of E-mu development (PC sound boards, PC based software), openning up EOS to an essentially-free-distribution compettitor would be suicide. Grim reality, companies don't subsist on kindness and good intentions towards the people dwelling in the past (um, that's us... sorry, but it's true) who aren't buying the current product.

That said, some better backwards compatability would be appreciated. If we could use Emulator X to program the E4-Ultra level machines, it would certainly give us a great incentive to buy the software...