Akai S700 Sample Dumping

Motu Fastlane

I have an old Akai S700 with a faulty disk drive. I've been meaning to get round to replacing the damaged belt with a new one, but also wanted to be able to archive the samples to my Mac. I knew from reading an old article in Keyboard magazine back in the 80's that the only application that works reliably is Sound Designer.

I managed to find a copy of Sound Designer (1.5 Universal) a while back to use with my old trusty Apple Mac Performa 630 (running Mac OS 7.5.5) and hooked it up using another old bit of vintage kit - my Mark Of The Unicorn 'Fastlane' 1 in 3 out midi interface.

Success! The Akai and Mac swapped file seamlessly..

On the left is the Akai loading the sample dump from Sound Designer; below is the file being sent.

I was hoping to integrate it with my Opcode Studio 5LX's but it doesn't completely work. While the Akai can receive the files from the Mac, there seems to be an issue sending files via the Studio 5's through the MOTU interface. I might be missing something though..

But, at the end of the day I can use my Akai s700 and save the samples onto my old P630 and Zip drive. It just requires changing a midi cable when using the S700 with the rest of my OMS setup. Not much of a hardship. I could get a Midi Merger though? That would fix that problem :-)

Vintage Ads Part 2 - Samplers

Some old sampler ads from the 80's

Vintage Ads Pt 1

From Keyboard Magazine: 1980-1990

Sorting Out

Had a clean up the other day - I'm a bit of a hoarder and keep all my music magazines and I found my old stash of Synth leaflets.

Ah, fond memories, dreaming of owning the gear in these leaflets... Never got the Jupe 8, but certainly got a bunch of the others..

Click on the pages to view the large versions

Patience pays off..

Well. I didn't buckle and buy Battery 3, instead I decided to spend time learning my RMV and adding my own drum samples (some of the supplied LinnPlug sounds were a little flat and dry for my liking, which was the problem I had with it) and I'm really quite pleased with it - and it works nicely with my Akai MPD16 drum pads too. I also realised that, already owning Kontakt, I didn't really need Battery, as I could easily add my old drum samples into that too.

Also, had a another result on E-Bay; I found a guy in Portugal selling two rare sound cards for my Korg S3, now I'll have all three! Fantastic...

Retro bargain

What a result! My Akai X7000's disk drive gave up the ghost a long time ago, leaving me saddled with over 100+ 2.8" Quick Disks, but luckily I picked up a second hand Akai s700 sampler for a tenner (£10) on E-Bay... Superb bargain when you think I paid £600 for my original. I'm hoping to re-sample all my old disks back into my other hard and soft samplers.

Fingers crossed the disk drive on the S700 works....