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1. Basic Operation Drag Method Methods of Translating i e How Do I Work This Thing There are two main methods available to you to translate a sample The Drag Method The Drag Method enables you to convert files from DOS to a proprietary SCSI Drive or from a proprietary SCSI Drive to either DOS or a proprietary SCSI Drive This is the method you will use most often Example Let s say you have an E mu CD ROM in your CD ROM Drive and you want to translate that into a GigaStudio file Here are the steps 1 Expand the DOS directories and locate where to store the new Giga file 2 Find the Emu Preset or Bank you can select a Folder an entire disk or multipleobjects also you want to translate on the Emu proprietary drive display it in the Right pane 3 Drag the Bank Preset from the Right Pane to the DOS directory you have chosen as the destination in the Left Pane Translation will automatically begin first by asking you which format you want to translate to Choose Gigasampler Instrument and double click or click on OK If there is a file with the same name as the one Translator tries to name the file you will get an message asking you if you want to overwrite it You can pre select what destination formats appear in this dialog or even if it comes up at all Select Tools Options and click on the Preferred tab Here you can pre select your destination formats For example if you check only EXS 24 every time yo
2. Renaming Renaming an object within Translator is done via clicking on the selected object again not double clicking just like the Windows Explorer program does Type in the new name of the object and either click again on it or press ENTER Translator effectively renames the object on disk in a complete manner as possible This means in the object itself and also in the directory listings Translator also attempts to find Multi files or the like that refer to the file by name and change the reference there too Samplers typically have their own conventions on what characters they support and what the rules are concerning dupicate object names Translator is aware of these and pay warp you if you are breaking the rules in any way Translator will not warn age SoundFont Import Formats Reads writes Standard MIDI Files AIFF and WAV files Reads libraries via SCSI in Roland 700 series Akai S900 S950 S1000 S1100 and S3000 and Ensoniq EPS ASR file formats Reads floppies in Ensoniq and Akai formats Comments Kurzweil samplers have a long learning curve Much of the power appears at the start of the interface usually confusing the novice before his morale gets going However given enough patience a Kurzweil can do anything you want Destination SoundFont History and File Format SoundFont is actually a file format specification But it used to be attached to the Emu EMU8000 chip which is used on many PC soundcards E
3. sign will be removed Default checked Test Mode Use this to compile files that you can send to Chicken Systems See Sending Files for more information Default unchecked Show SCSI ATAPI s Checking this option enables the locating of proprietary disk formats Ensoniq Akai etc on SCSI and ATAPI drives If there are none found this node SCSI ATAPI Drives will not appear in the left pane Default checked Page 25 Final Notes Final Notes A couple of things to keep in mind Please report any alleged bugs that you might come in contact with Also if you have any ideas about how to make Translator better or easier to use let us know Here are a few numbers to keep in mind Credits Translator was written by Garth Hjelte Mark Osbourn James Olsen Jeff Godbloch T Lindbaum Andrew Bush Christian Schmitz Thank You s Thanks to James Olsen for his generous help and partnership in SoundCentral Thanks to everyone who give their comments and help Thanks to the excellent set of beta testers involved with this project You can be a pseudo beta tester too just contact us and give us your opinion Thanks to following people of these manufacturers Emu Michael Mortimer Sean Wilhelmsen Brent Elder Eduardo Trama Ensoniq Bill Mauchley Native Instruments Julian Ringel Wolfgang Schneider Daniel Haver Michael Kurz Frank Hinkleman Nemesys Everyone including Joe Bibbo Jim Van Buskirk Dave Govett Suezean
4. Finally Korg put sampling back into their gear the Triton is essentially a Trinity with addi tional features onboard sampling and the ability to save samples onto disk which makes it credible enough for us to support The Triton is actually the main focus of Translator but the Trinity is included because it can load the Triton sounds off SCSI and save them in it s FlashROM For the remainder of this article both will be referred to as simply Triton Architecture Description Generally the main Instrument unit in a Korg is a Program This can reference up to 4 RAM waves or 4 KeyMaps kmp see below files depending on the setup and velocity settings More specifically there are 2 Oscillators per Program Combi s can hold up to 8 Programs As with the Roland XV 5080 and less so the Kurzweil the Triton is a synth sampler combined into one it can access sounds off internal ROM and samples loaded into it s RAM File Format Both the Trinity and Triton store their files the same way in DOS disk format that can be read Page 47 Miscellaneous Topics Stereo Wave Support You can access this dialog by right clicking on the disk itself if it s showing and selecting Format or you can go to Tools Format and choose the drive you want to format With all formats you are given the option to determine Size in mb This is enabled only if you have Custom Size selected Otherwise it will format the entire disk In the case of Virt
5. when translating an Akai Volume into something else this merges all Programs with the same Program Number into a single program since this is how the Akai plays things back Default checked Emu Options Tab Write files This dictates what type of Emu files you will translate into For example if you are translating an Akai Program and dropping it onto a Emu drive your action doesn t imply what type of Emu file you want written since Emu disks are the same for every Emu file format Translator will translate the Akai Program into whatever you have selected Default EOS Keep Emu file as is when no translation is required Checking this insures that no cross Emu translations will take place if it is not necessary Suppose you want to take an EOS file off an Emu disk and write it as an eos file on your DOS drive If this is checked and if the Write files parameter is set to something other than EOS such as E3 Translator will not translate it and simply write it as the normal EOS file Default checked Immediate Sample Read Pre EOS Emu formats do not list off the sample names in the Bank or Preset areas What this means is that if you are using the Translator interface and you are selecting a Bank Preset to see the sample names especially off a CD ROM and it s a large file this can take a significant period of time since Translator has to go all over the disk and grab simply the sample names Boring The default behavi
6. 0 Types Giga format 2 0 for GigaStudio only allows for 8 layers and supports extra LFO s and velocity crossfading Giga 1 0 only writes 4 layers maximum per Region Translator cannot write true Giga 2 0 files as yet In the meantime Translator can write Giga 2 0 capable files Giga 1 0 files with the added capability of the 2 0 variety If you choose this option you will need to use GigaStudio itself to convert the Giga 2 0 capable files into actual Giga 2 0 files Default Giga 1 0 Fade out non looped samples Sometimes sample files have some extraneous information at the end of the file This is usually not heard on hardware samplers because their output filters are usually clamping down on the outputs at this time Giga is more responsive so this appears as a click on non looped sounds This feature when checked applies a 16 sample fade out envelope to the data Default checked Page 29 Making a Test Mode File Making a Test Mode file A TestMode file is actually a DOS Counterpart file with the audio stripped and compressed using out onboard compression algorithm Usually these files are no more than 100K Take these steps to send the files to us via e mail so we may analyze it Go into Options and check Test Mode Exit Translator Start Translator and attempt the translation in question Exit Translator E mail us the Test Mode file and the apilog txt file There are in your application directory default c Program
7. Brass When you load Sample Cell Instrument Brass how does SampleCell or any other program or sampler that loads SampleCell files know where these other files are on the disk SampleCell for the Mac uses the filing indexing system of the Mac to find out where these samples are instead of storing the information itself So this means if Translator for Windows is going to read Mac disks to get SampleCell etc files it needs to index files itself This is what Macintosh Indexes are Translator tries to make this process as transparent as possible If a Mac disk has not been seen by Translator yet the first time you attempt to translate a file Translator quickly indexes the disk CD ROM for locations These are stored in the Translator key in the registry These are used all the other times Translator needs to locate sounds off this disk There may be times when you want to erase these indexes One reason may be because the indexing didn t work properly the first time Another reason is that you are using a Mac hard drive and the contents have changed You can erase previous indexes by choosing the menu option Tools Erase References Macintosh Akai Looping Boundary Requirements Although it is not documented and you can not see it on the displays all Akai sam plers only loop end on specific numerical boundaries The S 1000 series on loops on multiples of 64 the S 3000 series on multiples of 16 and the S 5000 of multiples of 8 In othe
8. Files Translator The Test Mode file names referring to the source file what you are translating FROM are as follows Akai Akai TestMode Emu Emu TestMode Ensoniq Ensoniq TestMode Roland Roland TestMode SoundFont SoundFont TestMode WAV WAV TestMode Reality Reality TestMode E mail the file back to us for analysis Additional Notes Please e mail all submitted files to support chickensys com We make a concerted effort to analyze files and comment or fix the problem with 24 business hours Please remember that most aspects of these disk file systems are completely reverse engineered without any help from the manufacturers The big reason for making Test Mode for you is not to make our customers beta testers but to provide a way to catch all circumstances and remedy them as they come All the file systems mentioned above even have bugs in them we have caught some but perhaps not all Contact Information Chicken Systems Inc 714 5th Street SE Willmar MN 56201 United States Toll Free Tech Support and Order Line 800 877 6377 International 320 235 9798 Technical Support 320 235 9798 Fax 360 838 7689 Support E mail support chickensys com Web Page www chickensys com Translator Page www chickensys com translator Page 34 Making a DOS Counterpart File program plus the samples to us But the Akai files are on an Akai formatted disk how do you send that The way you can do it is through a DOS Co
9. K1200 and the offshoot rack units which took ROM burned samples and played them back The 24 voice polyphony huge back then was very popular and Kurzweil sold a ton of them But the key to Kurzweil s sampling popularity was the K2000 which improved on the K1200 and implemented a sampling option Counting on the company s good reputation for their piano sound the K2000 gained a loyal following and is still being sold today In mid 1990 Young Chang acquired part of the technology and engineering team from the original Kurzweil Music Systems Inc Nevertheless the guts of the company remained in the US and continued improving on the K2000 base manufacturing other units such as the K2500 master keyboards such as the PC8 and even small rack units like the Kurzweil MicroPiano and other units Ray Kurzweil always the innovator left the company awhile ago but he continues in the voice interpretation field and other pursuits and is highly regarded as one of the leaders of computer technology today Disk and File Format Kurzweil s were ahead of their time in reading and writing to the DOS disk format since the beginning At least with floppy disks that is true but the hard drive SCSI implementation is a little stranger Early implementations of the K2000 used a DOS format that was very similar to the actual documented DOS disk format As a result depending on how the hard drive was written if you tried to read it using a PC or Mac y
10. NN 19 and several more for the NN XT Basic Page 58 Bitheadz Unity Win95 98 platforms As a result the Windows version were not very popular so SampleCell is really regarded as a Mac device Lot s of sounds were developed for SampleCell usually not originally but as variants off popular sound libraries Many professionals who used ProTools wound up including a Sample Cell card in their systems and since their voices are heard within the music equipment industry many sound disks were made available in SampleCell file format SampleCell stores it s sounds on regular Mac or DOS disk systems although ti s referencing is a little strange see SampleCell Indexes in the Miscellaneous Topics section The main Instru ment unit is called an Instrument and that could contain an infinite amount of KeyGroups that referenced Samples Mono and Stereo samples were supported Also the sounds could be AIFF Sound Designer I Sound Designer II or WAV and they could be mixed within a single SC Instrument Another file type is a Bank which loaded in one or more Instruments on separate or the same MIDI channel s Architecture Description SampleCell Instruments lack a filter but they have regular ADSR envelopes Generally SC is regarded as a good sample playback machine Import Formats digidesign didn t provide any translation programs but there have been other translation programs that have helped along the way such as Awave Osmosis and o
11. always asks you if you REALLY want to do this If you are deleting a Directory type of object such as an Akai Volume or an Ensoniq Directory it is obvious you are asking Translator to deleting all the objects within so Translator will delete these without prompt In certain cases Translator knows that certain files not being deleted have little or no use after this particular file has been deleted In some cases Translator will ask you if you want to delete these as well A good example of this is an Akai Program where the Samples in that Volume that were referenced by that program are not assigned to any other Program Translator also supports multiple object selection for deletion as well Combining Inserting Translator allows you to combine certain objects For example if you drag an Ensoniq Layer on top of another Ensoniq Layer with the intention to create 1 Layer out of it Actually put another way what you really want to do is to insert Layer B s wavesamples into Layer A s and save the result in Layer A s host instrument As you can see such a thing is only possible if the key ranges of both Layers do not overlap If this is the case Translator will reject the combination insertion and give you the reason for it Not all objects carry this support at this present time Translator will tell you if a certain combination insertion is supported or not on the attempt See also the related topic Adding for more information
12. and coming company Destination SampleCell History and File Format SampleCell was originally a computer card with a powerful sampler engine on it and recently was relased SoftSampleCell that does all of it s work within the CPU Developed by digidesign of ProTools fame it was primarily available for Macintosh although an NT version was made This was strange since it is very rare to see an item made for NT only and not the normal Page 56 Native Instruments Reaktor Battery Kontakt file s extension to SeerMusic hey why the 3 character extensions anymore The file format is practically identical except for one major change the Program chunk which holds all the Patch data is compressed This was an excellent idea since Reality has more parameters to deal with than any other sampling instrument Parameter information compresses very easily as well Our problem with that was that we couldn t read the format So Translator converts everything to bnk format in the future we may be able to perform the compression and upgrade to the seerMusic method Import Formats Reality has a comprehensive SoundFont import in fact they have optimized their synth engine to adapt to the envelope curves that SoundFont or more accurately the EMU8000 which the SoundFont is based implements Reality of course imports WAV files which is the common method of importing wavedata Reality stores the wavedata in the Reality file format and
13. checked to enable instant playback as you Select the sound This works on samples from any format and any disk Clicking the X in the upper left hand corner hides the player and disables it from playing You can make it appear from the View Show Wave View menu option rth ihae fins PF auto Peay d eriy Ld Eresin Flegi kemain Page 8 Property Sheets Property Sheets Property Sheets are where you can view AND edit any sampler file s parameters These come up in the same fashion as Windows Explorer right click on a file or object in either the left and right pane and select Properties Depending on the file or object a set of varied tabbed sheets will appear You can edit any parameter so listed except of course the read only types All edits are saved in a temporary file on the hard drive so all edits aren t written until you exit the property sheet with the OK button or click on Apply You can edit files objects on a CD ROM but of course you can t write to a CD ROM so Translator will ask you if you want to write the file to a DOS Counterpart file or to another propri etary hard disk Not all Property Sheets may be available in this present version of Translator more are added as time goes on SMDI SMDI is short for Sample Machine Digital Interface Actually that s a lie but whatever Believe it or not innovative sampler innovator Peavey came up with it and it the common protocol method to transfer sample
14. for Directory Page 10 Edit Any Sample Wave gt Multi Insts Files this effectively turns off the feature It takes each file and translates it like any other file All gt Single Inst File this is the most common setting This takes at most 127 files and maps them across the keyboard in the destination format you selected unless of course the destination format supports this GM Mapping same as All gt Single Inst File except that it automatically searches the file name or namming convention and maps it to the correspond ing General MIDI note Note This is not implemented yet Prompt Translator will prompt you each time it attempts a translation map Annoying but needed in some cases Prompt for Directory If checked Translator will ask you what directory to put all the combined translated files into This provides you with a way to write the results to a different directory This is needed especially if you are converting off CD ROM as if you don t have this option checked Translator will try to write the result in the directory it first starts trying to write the file to By the way if you make a mistake in this regard Translator will forgive you and ask what directory you want to put the resulting file into LoKey HikKey Sets the key range to map samples to Base Name for Combined Instruments Files This is the name that your combined files will take on plus a digit takced on afterwards Edit Any Sample Transla
15. locks up and can t recover except with a reboot Specifically the problem is in the Windows CDFS CD ROM File System driver Kurzweil s older proprietary format is so close to DOS that the CDFS actually gets confused by it while the regular hard drive file system does not Since many CD ROM s were produced then and now in order to retain compatibil ity with any Kurzweil OS this quasi DOS format is still be reproduced today For instance if a person creates some Kurzweil sounds and wants to put out a CD ROM likely they will take a pre Version 2 Kurzweil and format a hard drive with that older format write the files and then produce the CD ROM from that In fact the Power Tools CD ROM directly from Kurzweil is very much that way and in fact it crashes a Windows machine Since there s no way we know of repairing Windows to not crash upon detection of these disks short of calling Bill Gates to fix his operating system we have pro grammed Translator to deal with this issue at least and am supplying the user with tips on avoiding a possible crash If you would like to work with a Kurzweil disk and are having problems read the following All of this is intended to stop Windows from trying to access the drive If you are working with a CD ROM make sure the Auto Insert Notification 1s Page 19 Emu E3 ESi Import Formats The Roland imports the older S 50 550 format and does an AWFUL job importing Akai The XV
16. other cool features E E E E E i a a a a Recycle simply takes a loop and breaks it up to different time slices depending on what parameters and tempos you give it You give it a single wav or AIFF files or import and piece of wavedata from a sampler using MIDI SDS or SMDI and Recycle breaks it up depending on the inputted parameters and exports it back through that same medium To enter the lucrative WorkStation software market and to do something besides Recycle PropHead s put out Reason and platform with EVERYTHING A sampler synths sequencers effects mixers etc Reason has been highly popular ooo hue oC T Architecture Description Recycle Recycle makes a file which is essentially a copy of the data it receives along with the slice information created by itself The rex file is essentially an AIFF file except that it contains the slice information Recycle 2 0 uses a rx2 file and is encoded grrr and not currently supported in Translator Translator can take wavedata from any format and send it to Recycle from within Translator Architecture Description Reason The original Reason sampler was called NN 19 Rumor has it that the NN 18 was based on the old Fairlight platform Just kidding With the advent of Reason 2 0 it is now called NN XT Rumor has that the NN XS was based on the Prophet 5 synthesizer Just kidding again It s a basic architecture with one keymap for the
17. slow as a floppy This greatly accelerated the disinterest in the sampler The A4000 5000 Series was Yamahas attempt at improving the A3000 The SCSI Interface is still slow even with being improved slightly and the unit is difficult to use using terms and processes different than the mainsteam The Motif seems to be more successful than the previous incarnations It is not really a sampler but a sample playback machine however it can load many things and has an open architecture It s slick interface and marketing toward MPC types seem to secure its place in the market Architecture Description Yamaha uses samples in collections they call sample groups They then use Programs to put these together in a fairly simple organization There are two integrated effects processors which sound great File Format The A4000 Series use a proprietary format However they can read DOS formatted volumes it just doesn t save to them The Yamaha proprietary disk format is similar to DOS but diferent enough to not be read by a computer They also come with a great 12 CD library and all of them are readable in DOS format The Motif reads and writes to DOS cranking it up to modernity Page 60 Single Sound Files envelopes etc OF course as with all Rewire type products the format is encrypted so in the past Translator was not able to support it However NN XT supports loading of SoundFonts so the solution now is to translate into SoundFo
18. the entire Bank This can be as big as 32 megs The basic Instrument unit is the Preset It can point to some or all the Samples contained in the Bank It can contain two Layers of samples A Preset can be linked to another Preset so the Presets play simultaneously allowing you to play as many Layers as the polyphony will handle Also in the E3 E3x ES1 there is a limited amount of memory allocated for Presets only 228K bytes and the rest allocated for Samples For those reasons sometimes a translation will split into separate Presets with a indicating the slave linked Presets Import Formats The E3 E3x ESi can import Akai S 1000 Series Programs and Samples Page 44 Roland Architecture Description A Program is the single Instrument unit on the MPC It hold a group of sounds assigned to Pads Up to 4 Programs can be played at one time on the MPC giving it a 4 Layer capability You have nominal parameters such as volume filter and a small envelope Disk and File Formats All the MPC s write to DOS disk format although they use a proprietary partition scheme that we d rather not talk about A Program is saved as a pgm file and the samples in snd format Destination Roland History Disk and File Format Roland produced the S 700 750 760 line of samplers in the early 1990 s and has not followed this up for quite a long time Rolands have a dedicated following and a foothold in the media movie indus
19. three character code plus a colon If this option is checked Translator when exporting or importing a Roland object will ignore the first 4 characters and simply name the object as the following 12 characters Default unchecked Default Conversion If you are translating an entire disk this determines if translations will be based on Performances or the Patch Default Patch Prevent Performance Compression If you are translating an entire Roland disk this determines if the translations will be based on the Performances or the Patch Default unchecked Disallow translating or Names Designers of popular Roland CD ROM s use many blank objects to list categories in order to make lists more understandable These are real objects you would load they are simply blank If checked Translator will ignore these type of objects Default checked Enable Roland Digital Emphasis Filter Roland s use a special filter on input and output for their samples Translator simulates this with three different settings depending on your taste See the Roland Emphasis DeEmphasis article in Miscellaneous for specifics on these controls Default checked Drive Label This is the Drive Label that is written by default to a drive when you format it with Translator when the Prompt for Drive Label is checked in the Options General Tab Default Formatted GigaStudio Sampler Options Tab Giga 1 0 2
20. translation or get an error with Translator concerning a file the BEST way to communicate that with us is by e mailing us a source file with a small description of what the problem 1s THE MOST IMPORTANT THING IS TO ENABLE US TO EXACTLY REPLI CATE THE ISSUE We can t emphasize that enough Email to support chickensys com FTP to ftp ftp soundcentral com incoming no spaces in the file name If you are translating a DOS file such as a SoundFont than this is easy just zip up the file and e mail it But what if for example if you are trying to convert an Akai Program into a Gigasampler gig file and you get an error you would want to send the actual Akai Page 32
21. used on a PC without translating it to something else Mac SFIL Sound Files are also called System 7 sounds They are just basic Mac sound files Tritons use single sample files in conjunction with their other file types called ksf files The same goes for MPC s snd files and the original Creamware Pulsar s files A fundamental difference between any Single Sound format is the byte order PC s use Intel or clone processors which use little endian byte orders Each sample is represented by two 8 bit bytes and the one representing the smaller 8 bits is placed first and the one representing the larger 8 bits is placed second This is done because that s how Intel clone processors natively process their information Macs use Motorola processors which process their bytes in the opposite fashion big endian Thus AIFF Sound Designer and Triton files have their wavedata bytes reversed since they were originally designed to run on Motorola processors Page 59 Basic Operation Methods of Translating Basic Operation Translator is very easy to use Translator uses the familiar Explorer clone interface Fig 1 it looks just like Windows Explorer You translate files by either The Drag Method drag and drop or The Right Click Method That s all there is to it Translator simply adds to the Windows Explorer concept by adding all the SCSI and ATAPI drives that are available on the system It automatically
22. which is identical Architecture Description The single Instrument unit on the ASR X is the 1 SOUND file with the extension sou This holds the parameters and pointers to external wavedata files which are somewhat standard AIFF files The 1 SOUND is actually VERY powerful arguably the most powerful of any other format You have 16 possible Keymaps with 999 wavesamples to insert in them each having their own set of parameters Wow Two notes are in order concerning the architecture Ensoniq s original version of this was the MR which did not really hold samples It had 16 Keymaps but pretty sad Keymaps they were they could only hold one wavesample although you could set what keyrange and velocity it played in Ensoniq upon developing the ASR X knew of this limitation and realized that if it had to import EPS ASR samples which it was destined to do they would have to extend the format This they did but in a sort of shove it in manner Nevertheless it works Some 1 SOUND file are done this way some are not The second note is that none of this is available from the ASR X s front panel and Ensoniq failed to produce software to even accomplish this They did release a profile for the popular program Unisyn but that does not touch the powerful capabilities of the 16 Keymap 999 wavesample modification that Ensoniq did later Page 46 Emu EOS Destination Emu EOS o e History and File Format With the adv
23. 5080 however can import Akai sounds but not very well Comment Roland samplers sound really good There s a particular sound to them Especially the Orches tral samples sound great Rolands also support bidirectional looping as Ensonig and Kurzweil do and the additional looping modes make them very versatile es E MU z ENSONIG Por THE ARTS Destination Emu Emax E3 E3X ES1 History and File Format When E mu put out the Emulator 3 it was quite popular professionally as with the other Emulators But compared with today s standards of sound handling the 100 presets and 100 samples per Bank was quite limiting E mu then upgraded the E3 with the E3x modified the file format which provided 256 presets and 999 samples per Bank which was an acceptable improvement After the Emulator 4 series came out the E3x provided the basis for the new budget line of sampler by E mu the ESi series In fact the file format is about the same Emu then modified the file format yet again for the ESi version 3 which is present in today s ES1 32 v3 ESi 4000 and ESi 2000 Architecture Description A Bank is the single type of file this format accepts A Bank contains a set of Presets and Samples and when this is loaded into the E mu it replaces all the memory in the unit This results in some bulky file handling for example if you want to replace a single parameter in a Preset in order to save it you have to rewrite
24. Drives Sige SamgpleMap Akai Emu Exsoriq Acland Gigasangier Reaktor SanpleCel Soundont 5 24 ACID kursusi Recpcle Recount QreSthot Dirk Hepa Loop Bj acala Ei Humber ol baste io 1000 E Bogt nota For empong bort inanspose This screen may look familiar to SoundForge or ACID users it is just like the screen you see in these programs These are the parameters that are written into an ACID file when Acid ized One Shot This disables looping in the wav file Loop This enables looping Number of Beats 1 to 1000 This is commonly set to 4 as in 4 4 This sets up ACID on how it relegates tempo Root note for transposing Again this sets up ACID for where it transposes the note Disk based This sets the loops to work off the smpl chukn within the wav file SampleCell Options Tab Ignore Missing Samples Please see SampleCell Indexes for more information on this topic If checked if Translator doesn t find a sample or Instrument that a SampleCell file refers to it simply ignores the reference Otherwise it will prompt you if you want to reindex the drive Default Instruments SoundFont Options Tab Translate to Destination Unit When you translate a Sound Font file this determines whether you translate all the Instruments or all the Presets which are collections of Instruments Default Instruments Page 30 Options EXS 24 HALion Tab EXS 24 Options Intel Motoro
25. If you drop objects on this folder or below it they will translate into that directory See Options EXS Tab for more info Comments Due to the widespread popularity of Logic the EXS 24 is very popular due to it s integration with Logic EXS 24 also exists in a VST version called EXSP Destination Seer Systems Reality History and File Format Reality was one of the first Windows software synthesizers to gain credible professional acceptance and since then it remains one of the tightest and versatile instruments and it doesn t even exist That is it s software Since it runs in Windows it uses the DOS disk format and uses it s own file format Architecture Description Reality only uses one sound file the Bank This holds all the contents of memory to be used at one time similar to Emu s approach wavedata parameters setups etc The single Instrument unit on Reality is the Patch and a Bank can hold 128 of these A Patch is one Keymap and each section of the Keymap can hold up to 4 oscillators these can be samples or generated waveforms like sine sawtooth noise etc All 4 oscillators share the same parameters enve lope LFO etc Patches can be combined into Patchworks which can assign up to 16 Patches to be played at one time The initial version of Reality was called Reality 1 0 surprise surprise the bank files extension was bnk for Bank The latest version of Reality is 1 5 in which they change
26. Other Software Products from Chicken Systems Rubber Chicken Software Co sa Ensoniq MIDI Disk Tools iins AA have an ae EPS ASR 10 or TS s Sample y f programs will be iles in Tae out o also available separately as Ensoniq Disk Tools Ensoniq ASR X Tools The ASR X is a great machine but with no user interface The ASR X was really intended to be edited by a computer so HERE S the program for you Ensoniq ASR X Tools can edit the ASR X format translate EPS ASR sounds to ASR X format and you can add delete effects and edit the ASR X directly through MIDI Millennium for Akai S 3000 Series samplers Akai supplies MESA a computer interface program for the Akai for free It has bugs and problems Millennium fixes these provides a cleaner interface and enables you to read Akai CD ROM s and translate the files to MESA format Invaluable for Akai owners EAVES for Ensoniq EPS and ASR 10 Edit your EPS ASR 10 with your Macintosh In real time you can adjust any parameter such as envelopes graphically filters pitch and other valuable parameters See the wavesample onscreen and edit the loop points Future Products At Rubber Chicken we re always developing new products Check out our Web Site for the latest www chickensys com Manual copyright 2002 Chicken e b Systems All Rights Reserved Edition 1 3 ch cken SY S t ems chicken systems universal sampler file convertor and sampl
27. Please type in the UNLOCK CODE and KEYCODE exactly as shown 0 is always zero there is no capital O All characters are CAPITAL that is upper case Page 2 How To Make A Hard Thing Easy How To Make A Hard Thing Easy Translator is a powerful program no doubt However this can make a seemingly simple operation such as translating a sound a difficult process Shoot you just want to take this Roland CD ROM and translate it into Giga format but now you have to read about DeEmphasis Filters and Naming Conventions and all these things that you don t want to worry about Forget it When designing Translator we didn t want to make a translator like those found on hardware samplers We also knew people didn t want that either poor translation quality has always been a complaint Translation is a complicated process by nature as well Many times a parameter decision could go a number of ways How do we enable a user total control while hiding as much of the process as well When designing Translator we kept these facets in mind and have tried to make the translation process as easy and transparent as possible while at the same time given a user power when he needs it Hopefully you agree Here s a couple things you should remember to make Translating An Easy Thing Read the Manual Refer to the Help file We spent an inordinate time making a full length manual when we could have been adding features to the program fo
28. This algorithm does take a little longer to process Standard This was the original filter we composed using test lab equipment in house It s close but different Darker Same as Standard only a little darker Lighter Same as Standard only a little brighter Special We did this for Spectrasonics for their loop percussion libraries They needed a filter that was brioght enough for percussive sounds Custom You can manipulate the filter coeffecients with the sliders make your own setting There are some people that do not hear the effect of the Roland Emphasis curves there are people that like it dealt with but do not need an EXACT replication and there are people that want it exact or nothing Translator s digital filters can cater to any of these users Also if you actually LIKE the curve and do not want any alter ation you can turn it off in the Options dialog Alternate Looping Modes Some samplers have different looping modes that other samplers do not support Ensonig and Kurzweil Supports bi directional looping where the data goes forward from the Sample Start to the Loop End then goes backward to the Loop Start then forward again to the Loop End ad infinitum Roland Forward Release Loops just like a standard loop but when the key is re leased the data moves forward past the Loop End to the Release Loop End and then loops a different loop determined by the Release Loop Start and End Reverse Loop The data g
29. Van Buskirk Bert Bischoff Mike McRoberts at Tascam Roland Jim Norman Seer Systems David Roach Cosmo Watts John Holton Akai David Whittle Korg Jack Hotap Jerry Kovarsky Emagic Clemens Holmburg Bob Hunt Chris Miller Thanks to the excellent people whom helped along the way not a complete listing Bill Felton Thomas Hammer Terje Finstad Barry Kirsch Keith Thomas Pelle Piano Douglas Thornton Ron Aston Tan Underwood Terry Fryer Michael Bard Lennie Moore Andreas Larrson Jer Olsen Drew Neumann Thomas Bleicher Jan Van Valkburg Charlie Pollard Thanks to the excellent people at these companies Syntaur Productions Sam Mims John Gould MIDI Mark Mark Schaefer Kid Nepro Steve Proto SoundLogic Mik Adams Syntrillium Software David Johnston Page 38 Updating Translator Updating Translator The Translator is initially is sent via snail mail in all cases Whole programs are not sent through electronic means or are available for download on any Web site Translator Updates are available at our Web Site They are in the form of updaters to bring your currently installed program to the latest version To Update You simply click the Auto Update menu option under Help in Translator that will bring up your browser dial the Internet and take you to a Web page that will inform you on the availability of an update If there is one it will display a link for you to download it Download the Patch and run the program follow th
30. a good appeal This is a good example of one Destination History This created a minor splash in 2001 when it was released and even won a Best Software award from Electronic Musician It was some unique features ones that you would expect from a more expensive sampler It is PC only and VST based Architecture Description and Features Up to 128 voices 8 stereo outs 16 channels fast customisable file and memory explorer with drag and drop virtually unlimited instruments and parts in each patch multiple levels of undo indicators to show channel activity and what notes and even individual samples are playing drum mode makes setting up drum maps easy beat slicing groove extraction and MIDI recording any number of grooves and arpeggiators in a patch create arpeggio styles with control of timing accents and note choice for each step slice up drum loops and control each slice far beyond simple time stretch hundreds of simultaneous modulation links within each patch 3 EGs 3 syncable LFOs and a cross linkable envelope follower for each part effects sends modulated within each part and sent to the VST mixer flexible filters with Warmth and Drive controls fully customisable MIDI controllers virtual joystick controller integrated wave editor looping with crossfades with real time auditioning customisable links to external wave editors keeping loop points intact all wav and AIFF files up to 32 bit float Page 63 chicken sy
31. an at a optimum level Translator will automatically normalize these samples if this is checked Page 31 Troubleshooting and Support Troubleshooting and Support General Info At Chicken Systems we pride ourselves for the personal support we can give because we believe the only important problem to you is your own problem Before you call see the Common Questions section and Common Problems section If you need to call or e mail for support we do ask of you some requirements Please describe the problem specifically what screens come up what do they say verbatim any repeatable steps we can describe so we can duplicate the error here If you say it doesn t work we are sorry that just is not enough for us to go on It is vital that we can replicate the error We need to know what is the difference in your computer that is causing the conflict Itis VERY HELPFUL to send us a DOS Counterpart best if possible or a TestMode file These file are compressed to a very small size so you can attach it in an e mail message to us These are very helpful in determining what the problem is See Sending Files for instructions how to do this Tell us which Version and Build of the program you are using what platform Win95 98 ME Win XP 2000 NT Mac OS8 9 If the program crashes please be specific does the computer freeze or do you get an error dialog What does the dialog say Sending Files If you have a problem with a
32. and it will sound duller Page 17 Ensonig ASR X The Ensonig TS series TS 10 and TS 12 can play Ensoniq EPS ASR sounds and share the same platform Lastly the swan song ASR X although based on a different engineering platform inheirits the same sound architecture Architecture Description EPS ASR basic sound unit is an Instrument which contains up to 8 Layers which can contain up to 127 wavesamples among themselves You can have 8 Instruments loaded in the sampler at one time The only sound file format is the Instrument which contains all the parameters and the wavedata needed Import Formats The ASR 10 with it s later operating systems can read Akai S 1000 and Roland S 700 files Comments Ensonig samplers remain the most underrated sampler platform of the day Personally if I had to have one sampler to work with on a desert island it would be an ASR 10 keyboard No other sampler can do everything as well as the ASR 10 Effects 5 stage envelopes Great sequencer Great sound Ease of use Intuitive storage system Many looping algorithms Fractional loop points And on and on Destination Ensoniq a i ia a lt r m m m oe ee History and File Format It took Ensonig 4 years to come out with another sampler after the ASR 10 This was the ASR X which was really a sampler adaptation of the earlier MR series keyboard It uses the DOS disk format Ensonig came out with another version called the ASR X Pro
33. any instructions for their use These are shelled within Translator and enable you to at least read a file onto your hard drive so Transla tor can at least get to it That s the extent of it though so far This manual only refers to the Windows version What about the Mac version How do I operate that It doesn t really look like the Windows version There is a small PDF manual included with it However it isn t complete so this manual can be helpful in defining the terms you need to know There will be a replacement manual avaialble later this year 2002 This will include both PC and Mac instructions but will be easier to understand as the Windows and Mac versions will have identical features and look principally the same Do you support fill in your sampler here yet Go to the Translator Status page at www chickensys com translator documentation html Look for the SOURCE and DESTINATION sampler formats you are interested in and see what is supported so far This page is updated daily to reflect the current transla tions available and along with the mailing list updates is the first and only source for current information on translations Why should I use Translator when my sampler already imports the formats I want Translator can potentially make better faster and more usable translations For example the Ensoniq ASR X imports Ensoniq EPS ASR sounds but there are certain critical translation problems the effects DSP i
34. are able read directly off Akai disks and store their data in p Program and s Sample files The newer PowerSamplers STS 3000 and 4000 use p files plus wav files with special chunks while the STS 5000 uses sts files for the programs and the same wav files for the data These files are exactly the same as the contents of the Akai files themselves and Pulsar actually edits these files in the same way the Akai does In fact you could call the Pulsar samplers virtual Akai S series samplers and you would be just about right Note Pulsar takes license with the files sometimes and omits some information that an Akai needs Translator tries to compensate for these differences The newer STS x000 players within Pulsar add some extra parameters not found in the Akai s but it s minimal The reason for the p wav combinations is that it allowed compatibility for external listening to the samples without having to go into Pulsar and along with the sts files it allowed long file names to be used Comments Akai samplers have wound up being tremendously popular almost to the point of the being a de facto standard since so many CD ROM s are produced for them This is due partly to Akai s popularity in Britain and Europe where many sound developers there have taken great opportunities Akai samplers surprisingly do not import any other formats perhaps they don t need to CD ROM s and all sounds are practically available in their nat
35. computers can t recognize life would be a lot easier But you can t blame the manufacturers many sampler s initial conceptions came in the late 1980 s early 1990 s Back then Windows was hardly an accepted operating system and DOS was definitely not de facto standard Also memory was expensive and that played a part in instrument design DOS Counterpart Files is the term we use for storing sampler files that were designed to be stored on proprietary non DOS formats on DOS disks For example the Ensonig stores it s Instrument files on it s own special disk format but it can be read and stored as an efe or an efa file on a DOS drive Of course the Ensonigq can t read this file directly but it does enable the user to work with the file more easily Even more importantly it allows transfer of the file over the Internet A DOS Counterpart File is not a super complicated thing It basically is the actual file plus some extra information called a header stored at the beginning Some DOS counterpart file formats were created by Chicken Systems mostly because they didn t exist but in other cases we adopted what was already existing Chicken System s position is the the fewer the formats the better we seek standardization on every level In Translator you can use DOS counterpart files just like you use the files as if they were on their proprietary disks The only difference would be that you would right click to convert these to anoth
36. d eos were developed by Chicken Systems whereas e4b is what is written by the EOS samplers when saving an Emu bank to floppy All the Chicken System s formats have a 512 byte header that stores the actual Bank Name and other pieces of information This is needed to save the actual Bank Name because it is possible to have characters in the Bank Name that can t be used in a DOS or Mac file name e4b is simply an eos file without this header Roland rol The rol format was developed by Chicken Systems to represent a Roland Volume rarely though Performance Patch Partial or Sample objects in one file The floppy disk program SDisk included as unsupported with the Translator package used the default extension out and those files aren t supported by Translator Kurzweil krz k25 k26 This isn t really a DOS counterpart file since Kurzweil has always paralleled the DOS format at least as always writing and reading to DOS for floppies It s only mentioned as a DOS counterpart file because Kurzweil s used a quasi DOS disk format and stored krz files on that format See the Miscellaneous topic Kurzweil CD ROM Support for more information Formatting Drives and Virtual Drives You can format hard drives and Virtual Drives into any format you want Kurzweil by a computer The main file in a Triton is a pcg file which stores some or all Combis Programs and other settings PCG s don t store any wavedata though just pa
37. d Mono samples You can also specify up to 32 velocity splits wow but this is lessened the more Layers you use The envelopes are semi regular PADSR s Giga also supports Performance files prf in Giga 1 0 gsp in Giga 2 0 which are essentially macros that load Instruments into the different MIDI channels Translator presently supports the Giga 1 0 prf format which can easily be translated into 2 0 gsp GigaStudio files There are quite a few commercial Giga libraries that use a special compression algorithm these files won t permit wav extraction and make the file smaller in size by about 20 These wav aren t looped but since when is it important for Giga samples to be looped Import Formats Giga of course imports WAV files of all types which is the common method of importing wavedata It stores the wavedata in the gig file format and does not use pointers to external files Giga has an included program called S Converter which converts Akai S 1000 and S 3000 formats In fact it is a lot like Translator on a limited basis GigaStudio includes an Audio Ripper called A Converter and can convert SoundFonts and DLS Level 2 files Page 52 Steinberg HALion Another interesting aspect of the SoundFont is that parameters can be modified up the chain For example you can have three Instruments with certain settings and then program a Preset that combines all the three Instruments plus can implement it s own envelopes param
38. d the Page 54 Emagic EXS 24 One very interesting thing about Giga is that the file format had a copy protection feature on it A sound development company would be able to produce files that cannot be loaded unless a code is entered after that the sound resides in that computer while being authorized by that code This could ve helped protect the company from having pirated samples floating around Interestingly GigaStudio does not retain this protection although it gives you some hard time dialogs that post warnings Translation Notes More effort and time has gone into Giga translations than any other format Translator writes into Giga 2 0 format eliminating the need to convert them within Giga Translator also is the only software to compensate for pitch tracking and tuning properly as well as supporting Roland Performances and Emu EOS Links You can be assured that Translator s Giga transla tions are the highest quality possible Giga only supports 128 Instrument maximum per file Certain import formats like Emu Kurzweil SoundFonts and others can have more than 128 Instrument units to convert When this happens another gig file with a unique digit trailing the file name will be created to handle more Instruments Comments Giga is very popular and is popular with many users composing and recording with it It has many people even Mac stalwarts in fact everybody switching to this new platform EXS24 Emagic Xtrem
39. de effects of a proprietary format is that only your piece of equipment can play all the cool sounds that are available Hardware Specific Each piece of musical equipment from the design stage on up requires different things to be accessed and stored often in different structures and orders This was even more critical in the early days the 1980 s where memory was at a minimum and tolerances were thinner Thus each piece of equipment had to be designed with their own file format not only that but with there own organization of structure on a disk Many pieces of equipment were designed in a time when PC s and Windows were not a dominant thing Lot s of Brilliant People There are quite a few geniuses in the world that strangely enough are musicians thus they want to design musical gear Just like the creative types that they are they ve gotta do it their way Translator can take most major professional disk and file formats and translate between them That means reading interpreting and writing between different systems whether that means reading a DOS file like a WAV file or writing a complex Ensoniq file to a proprietary disk format on a SCSI hard drive If you are a registered owner you are qualified for free updates for the life of the program which can be download from our web site at www chickensys com transla tor userupdates There are many things we intend to add to this program to make it more versatile fo
40. detects the format of the particular drive upon start up and lists only the proprietary ones You can refresh the screen using the Refresh F5 command Translator recognizes all types of media SCSI ATAPI USB parallel port and more NOTE For ease of explanation when we refer to SCSI Drives we mean all the SCSI USB Parallel or ATAPI drives in the system Your regular computer hard drive s is technically ATAPI which is the new word for IDE It is always formatted for DOS and so it never comes up in the SCSI ATAPI Drive area Theses drives are represented in the upper area as one drive with Logical Drive Letters a c d etc Depending on how your particular computer is set up all the SCSI Drives will have a drive letter in the upper area however depending on if there is a disk or not in the drive or if the format is not DOS Windows you will simply get an error message if you try to access the drive from the drive letter In other words DOS Windows is the upper area and all proprietary formats Ensoniq Akai etc are in the lower area This includes Mac disks and Kurzweil CD ROM s because of special circumstances they need to be shown there Ee Ge oe biH de ee a bee ee eS E E m mm e E a E E E E E z a Le oa E oe er There are two more areas you may see Virtual Drives and SMDI Those are covered in later chapters VOLE RU Ea Lad E PULL LLLEELS me miii
41. ditor using this field Default unnamed Temp Directory If you want to you can choose the directory where Translator stores all your temporary files the ones that it makes transparently unbeknowest of you Otherwise Translator uses the temp directory set by windows most often c windows temp Default unchecked and unnamed Erase Temp Files Translator writes some temporary files sometimes fairly large into the Windows temporary directory usually c windows temp but you can set it yourself below Checking this option causes Translator to erase all these files that is all the ones Translator ones prefaced with tlr upon start up Default checked SCSI Buffer IMPORTANT DO NOT CHANGE THIS UNLESS YOU UNDERSTAND THE RAMIFICATIONS SCSI and ATAPI communication works in packets The Default size of each packet maximum is 32 768 bytes 128 blocks This works on most computers SCSI cards and ATAPI drives It is recommended that you leave this on Default unless you are having problems with reading or writing to SCSI or ATAPI drives If you are having problems try setting this value to a lower setting Make sure you are using a disk or drive where you will not mind if data is lost Page 26 Options General Tab No non critical check Translator checks for installation files when it starts up Translator always checks for all the files necessary for it to run minimally However it is possible you might not have all the fi
42. does not use pointers to external WAV files Comment Reality is a wonderful bastion of parameter shaping abilities You can FM the samples you have 4 envelopes 4 LFO s 4 Filters configurable in many arrangements and much more Even Reverb although it s cheesy We personally are Reality fanatics Destination History Native Instruments have been making great software based instruments for a long time THe foundation of their work is a platform called Reaktor It contains massive amounts of DSP ability and modular synthesis Reaktor because fairly popular but it wasn t packaged in a easy to use or understandable way Thus NI went on to make Battery which was more of a sampler than Reaktor it was based more toward drum users was but not a complete package Kontakt fulfills the promise of a heavy duty killer app sampler Reaktor Reaktor comes packaged with a suite of synthesis and music programs for Windows AND the Mac called Generator and Transformator Transformator is specifically the Sampling area but the names start getting thrown around and well we Il just call it all Reaktor Battery Battery look different than most software samplers it contains cells which somewhat represent drum pads they do represent each MIDI note supported Each cell can reference one or more samples Battery can read Akai disks Kontakt This heavy duty sampler is truly modular in that you can reference any amount of sampl
43. e computer This is the model for all external hardware computer integrations Recently Akai came out with the MPC 4000 a really hopped up modern version of the MPC s However it s really more like a S 5000 with drum pads It uses the same format so that s why we included it here Architecture Description The S 5000 doesn t improve enormously on the S 1000 3000 platform in fact it s almost exactly the same The accessories and the memory really pull it ahead Dual SCSI ports advanced effects multiple outputs and other improvements make the S 5000 a winner Disk File Format Akai adopted the DOS disk format with this sampler The Program file is an akp file where the samples are wav files not unlike the Pulsar STS format An Akai Multi is stored as a akm In fact the arrangement of the file in DOS is almost just like the S 1 3 just with tags Destination Akai MPC 60 3000 2000 History The MPC has a long history before it was even Akai s instrument Invented by Roger Linn of LinnDrum fame for Akai it was a successor of the ill fated Linn9000 It was a sampler in every form but made to be a drum machine It s the precursor of every groove box made today The first MPC was the MPC 60 improved to the MPC 3000 which is still made Then the MPC 2000 came out then the MPC 2000XL See S 5000 above for details on the MPC 4000 Akai S 1000 3000 MESA Pulsar A common usage of the Akai is to play multiple Programs
44. e Sampler 24 Bit Destination History and File Format Emagic a German company with sales offices in the USA makes Logic a cross platform Mac and Windows although it is more based on the Mac centric way of doing things sequencer and audio recorder It is very popular Emagic decided to make a sampler that works in conjunction with Logic and came up with the EXS 24 It only works within Logic and like Logic it is available in both Windows and Mac flavors Recently Emagic released a streaming module for EXS 24 making it the fourth sampler to stream samples off disk the other three being Giga HALion and VSampler This definitely makes it more popular Architecture Description The EXS 24 uses a simple method of Zones which are just KeyGroups You can have an infinite amount of these per Instrument You can also make objects called Groups which you can sort Zones under although a Zone isn t required to attach itself to one The EXS 24 is a fairly simple sampler using ADSR envelopes a seemingly nice filter with Page 53 Single Sound Mapping Upon clicking the you will see all the current samples stored in the SMDI sampler You can drag samples in and out of the device by dragging and dropping Single Sound Mapping It s a common operation to want to take single wav files or the like and make a combined file out of them mapping the samples across the keyboard This is effective for drum kits loops etc Transla
45. e other files that support wnaspi32 dll this is what well refer to as the ASPI layer For Win 95 98 ME these are the ASPI layer files APIX VXD the virtual device driver ASPIENUM VXAD a driver that helps apix vxd These are the ASPI layer files for NT 2K XP ASPI32 SYS the virtual device driver WOWPOST EXE the 16 bit thunker usually not necessary but required to have in the system The Windows 95 98 ME install includes wnaspi32 dll and the ASPI layer The NT 2000 and XP installs do not include wnaspi32 dll nor the ASPI layer files There is another file aspi sys that will be discussed below along with a discussion concerning the emergence of third party ASPI technologies Page 21 Akai S 5000 4 ne Destination Akai S 5000 MPC 4000 Disk and File Formats Finally Akai decided to improve on it s S 1000 type series The result was the S 5000 Series with it bigger brother S 6000 even enabled the screen to detach from the front panel Sporting a maximum of 256mb of memory the the S 5000 series looked great out of the gate But i 3 Initial bugs and customer dissatisfaction worked against it It took about 18 months to really get the sampler in working order after release Presently it s a great piece of gear The Akai has an option of a USB port and a remarkable piece of softare called akSys This enables remote control of the Akai and allows flawless integration between the Akai and th
46. e prompts and your Translator copy will be updated You do not need to incrementally update Your only concern is to update your version to the current one displayed NOTE If you cannot connect to the Internet from the computer that is running Translator go to www chickensys com translator userupdates and you can download the new version from there To Install Reinstall Update Translator from Scratch 1 Uninstall Translator or simply delete the application directory 2 Install the original Program from your installation CD ROM 3 Since the latest version of Translator may need updated or different setup files download the Translator Setup File from www chickensys com download and install it on your computer in the same directory you installed Translator in default c Program Files Translator 4 Download the latest update patch from the web site see above 5 Install the patch and run the program We do not send full programs via e mail Updates full versions registration numbers and or printed manuals sent through snail mail or e mail carry a charge of 5 00 8 00 international for each item Page 37 Options General Tab Show Virtual Drives Checking this option enables the locating of registered Virtual Drive files img If there are none found this node Images will not appear in the left pane Default checked Show Destination Folder After Translation After a translation Translator by default shows t
47. ed size and format Create a New Virtual Drive from an existing SCSI ATAPI Drive Click on the menu item Tools click on Virtual Drives click on the drive The Common Dialog will apear asking you where you want to store the file containing the Virtual Drive and what to name it default is the name of the drive itself The Yes No Cancel dialog will appear for size confirmation Yes will continue the operation No will have a Input Box appear asking you how much of the drive you want to read Cancel aborts the operation Translator will start creating an Image of the selected drive note if the drive is DOS formatted it will not show up in the Virtual Drives area Page 7 SampleCell File Formats Reaktor is able to play single keymaps from a file called the MAP file map It can contain samples internally or reference wav of AIFF files externally Battery uses a file format called kit it does not contains samples but can reference them The format is XML by the way Kontakt uses nki to store Instruments and nkb files to store Banks which are just chains of Instruments They also reference external wav or AIFF files We believe in the future monolith files will be supported meaning they will contain the samples internally in the format Architecture Description Reaktor The single Instrument unit on Reaktor is the Ensemble file ens This can hold the contents of a map file described earlier Currently Translator only
48. ent of the modern Emulator 4 sampler series the E4 E64 E6400 others E mu created a monster OS called EOS Emulator Operating System They completely redid the file format which was completely messy after the ESi tweaking although the disk format and the basic architecture remained the same EOS took advantage of the large screen display they started manufacturing Any EOS sampler is a joy to work with as the large screen facilitates operations extremely well Architecture Description The architecture is similar to the ESi a Bank is the single type of file this format accepts As described in the E3 E3X ESi section a Bank contains a set of Presets and Samples and when this is loaded into the E mu it replaces all the memory in the unit This results in some bulky file handling for example if you want to replace a single parameter in a single Preset in order to save it you have to rewrite the entire Bank This can be as big as 128mb The basic Instrument unit is the Preset It can point to some or all the Samples contained in the Bank You can place a maximum of 128 Voices within a Preset and place a keymap of Samples in each Voice You can still link Presets but there is less need to with the power of the EOS While Preset memory and Sample memory are still separately and have fixed allocations the Preset memory is larger 3580K bytes as opposed to 228K for the E3 E3X ES1 Emu recently released version 4 7 of it s operating sys
49. er DOS format instead of dragging the file across the interface Below is a description of the different DOS Counterpart file types and extensions Akai ak1 ak3 p s sts prg s3p This is definitly the most complicated DOS counterpart set p and s come from the Pulsar platform which simply takes a Akai program sample and writes it as a p or s file A sts file is an Akai program with someextra chunks added on the end prg and S3p are practically identical they are produced by MESA They are Akai programs encoded with sys ex 7 bit encoding ak1 and ak3 files S 1000 3000 files were developed by Chicken Systems They are an attempt to include the contents of an Akai Program Volume into one file Page 14 Formatting Disks Ensonigq efe efa This format was introduced by Giebler Enterprises efe represents a EPS or EPS 16 Plus file can be any type such as an Instrument Bank Song Sys ex Effect etc and efa stands for a ASR 10 type of file The ede and eda file types represent whole Ensonigq floppy disk images There are other file formats introduced by other DOS programs noteably gkh Translator does not support this format ins also existed but that was identical in content to the efe format Translator does not support this either not only because of it s redundancy but that it would conflict with the Sample Instrument extension which is also ins Emu esi e3 eos e4b esi e3 an
50. er tool Translate different samplers between each other Akai Roland Emu Ensoniq Kurzweil Yamaha GigaStudio Kontakt EXS 24 HALion Sample Cell SampleTank Creamware Reality Sound Font and much more ti tcana E E r Yi Manual copyright 2002 Chicken SystemsRubber Chicken Software Co All Rights Reserved No reproduction without permission allowed Other Formats Destination VSamp History VSamp has been around for a little while Written by a chap named Malcolm Blaylock it has a loyal following and it s appeal is it s compactness and ability to use little resources to do what it does Again Digital Performer users like this app since it take littloe resources to run it and Digital Performer s VST implemntation is not too efficient Architecture Description Let s have them describe it 128 voice polyphony 24 bit 96kHz support resonant lowpass filters with realtime control low frequency oscillators to modulate pitch and filters VST plugin for playing VSamp instruments and banks from within Cubase Logic and other sequencers very stable and CPU efficient sample player support for MacOS X including CoreMIDI Services and a price of just 39 File Format VSamp does not use an extension it s Mac it writes the filetype into the file and it references any type of sample file such as AIFF SoundDesigner or wav Comments It s real nice to have samplers available for an inexpensive price and still have
51. es and include whatever processing you want If you want 4 LFO s go ahead and put them in 32 stage envelopes No problem As you can see Native Instruments really leverages their past experi ence with DSP Page 55 Waveplayer You can delete a Virtual Drive by simply right clicking on it and selecting Delete This simply deletes the file that represents the Virtual Drive and unregisters the file You can also delete a Virtual Drive by deleting it using any other Windows method When Translator starts up again or Refreshes and it finds the file doesn t exist it will unregister it automatically There may be instances where you have reinstalled Translator or did something to erase the references to the Virtual Drive in the system registry You can register them back into Translator by using the Register Virtual Drives menu option under Tools Once you have created a Virtual Drive you can drag and or drop and perform functions just like any other SCSI ATAPI Drive That is the single purpose of Virtual Drives to emulate the existence of an external SCSI Drive that you would hook up to your sampler in software on your computer Waveplayer This is the powerful auditioning feature of Translator As you can see Translator shows the full sample plus the loop area if there is one Translator also loops the sound upon playback The slider provides volume control the combo box provides selection of sound devices and Auto Play can be
52. eters and pitch changes to override or add to the Instrument level parameters The basic Instrument unit can either be the Preset or the Instrument depending on the program ming If an Instrument is the Instrument Unit there usually is a matching Preset that maps just the one Instrument Comments A SoundFont upon observation is quite a capable format If it weren t for company rivaleries it would probably what all samplers loaded Destination Steinberg HALION History and Architecture Description The Steinberg HALion is the third great streaming software sampler behind the great Giga and VSampler It is a VST sampler designed to be used with VST enabled sequencers such as Steinbergs own Cubase Logic Audio from emagic and other platforms It offers better envelopes than regular ADSR s multi mode fitlers and sample accurate response The parameters are much easier to get at and are farther down the chain than compared to the emagic EXS 24 HALion uses the Akai ish Keygroup method to map out samples and the important parameters are on the Sample level yeah One main loop and a Release loop are supported Check this out 8 stage envelopes A neat inclusion is that you can add stages up to 8 so you don t have unneeded stages cluttering your interface With version 1 1 HALion added a Mega Trigg function which allows many different ways of turning on or off a keygroup with a key on or key off or a envelope or m
53. g Deleting Renaming and Combining Objects They are supported in varying degrees at the moment but eventually they will be all supported These functions usually exceed what your sampler is capable of and the interface is always much better since you can see the entire scope of your files in one screen It s the most important power of a computers GUI interface Adding It s one thing if you want to drag over an Akai Program with it s samples of course and make a new GigaStudio file gig Translator goes a step further and allows you to do these type of things for example Drop an Akai Program on an existing gig file in order to add a Giga Instrument and the samples imported over to the gig file Drop an wav file on a Giga Region in order to add the sample to the gig file and also add a Layer dimension in Giga terms to that particular Region This doesn t pertain to only Giga but other formats as well Dues to the complexity of these type of operations some are supported and some aren t Translator will tell you what is supported and what is not as you attempt the additions See also the related topic Combining for more information Deleting Deleting an object within Translator is done by selected the object you want to delete Page 12 Inst Sample Management Combining Inserting in the left pane or the right pane and pressing the DEL key on the keyboard Since this is a destructive procedure Translator
54. g the MPC meaning that the bytes are stored in a left right left right fashion instead of all the left bytes first and then all the rights A data chunk can be added that includes loops root keys and other information Comments No Single Sample file is really superior than another Really it is dependant on what applica tion plays it back For instance you can have key range info embedded in a AIFF file but if youa re just playing it back on a computer which natively does not play things back at various pitches it doesn t make a difference Destination 3 YAMAHA History Yamaha the company who makes everything has at certain times made their stab at making a sampler Most of the time they wound up sub par compared with the rest of the pack The first sampler Yamaha created was the TX16W It had a lot of potential but other more feature packed samplers surpassed it As it was Yamaha seemingly didn t have the interest to jump into the rapidly advancing sampler game Strangely enough right after Korg who Yamaha owns 51 of bought Sequential Circuits it inheirted their new prototype Prophet 3000 sampler which Sequential Circuits released right when they were going under Yamaha renamed it the P3000 and very few were sold The recent A3000 was Yamaha s jump back into the game The great thing about it was the massive architecture with multiple envelopes and processing The bad part of it was the SCSI interface was about as
55. he contents of the destination folder If you would like to override this check this box Default checked it is recommended that you uncheck this though Combine Stereo Combine Unconditionally A source format may use two mono files to represent one stereo file Checking this option allows Translator to check a possible stereo pair and possibly combine them into one stereo file if the destination supports it In checking a possible steroe pair Translator generally checks to see if these files are the same length and have the same playback mode in order to determine if they should be combined If Combine Unconditionally is checked Translator will combine them no matter what Combine Stereo Default checked Combine Unconditionally Default unchecked Erase Temp Files Translator writes some temporary files sometimes fairly large into the Windows temporary directory usually c windows temp but you can set it yourself below Checking this option causes Translator to erase all these files that is all the ones Translator ones prefaced with tlr upon start up Default checked SamplePlayer Save Prompt This is is association with the use of the SamplePlayer You can double click on a sample in the Right Pane of the interface to play it out your sound card Checking this option enables you to save that as a wav file after the playing is completed Default unchecked Sample Editor You can choose the source path of your Smaple E
56. import EPS ASR files from their proprietary disk formats and their efe efa DOS counterparts keymaps and parameters Unfortunately this import function has a couple disastrous flaws which unfortunately doom many imports Our company s ASR X Tools product has an import feature which does an excellent job of translat ing EPS ASR Instruments into ASR X files this has been carried over into Translator Comment Ensoniq samplers are vastly underrated as far as their internal architecture goes which is more powerful than many of the supposedly more popular competition Some of this was Ensoniq s fault of mismanagement which eventually doomed their company but another was the stigma of having the produced the Mirage People had the mindset that Ensoniq was the budget bargain basement company when in actuality they produced a superior instrument in many ways Destination Korg Trinity Triton History Disk and File Format Korg has attempted samplers at various times The first was the DSS 1 which was fairly popular in the 12 bit days After that Korg emphasized other keyboards such as the M 1 and the T Series which were all sophisticated sample playback machines Then the Korg Trinity caused a stir and still does with its marvelous sounds The Trinity is actually a sample playback unit but not only plays onboard ROM sounds but has an option FlashROM kit and can read WAV AIFF files and Akai files through its optional SCSI port
57. in dual mono waves if panned hard left and right are technically the same as stereo waves with three notable exceptions With most if not all platforms streaming that is the procedure of playing back a wave is less stressful on the playback machinery thus reducing latency Nemesys has told us that it does not make a ton of difference on their units but we will take the conventional wisdom and assume that stereo is better When editing on most platforms editing parameters on one side of a stereo wave edits the other side automatically This is usually a good thing unless you are getting creative and want to make changes to one side and not the other The famous Distorted Reality CD ROM s are great examples of this Stereo waves are easier to organize and streamline within an interface since it reduces the number of waveforms within a structure Roland Emphasis Deemphasis Filtering The wavedata information sampled with a Roland S 7x Series sampler is treated with a Frequency Emphasis boost which pumps up the high end When the Roland plays the sound out of its outputs its internal hardware filters compensate for the built in frequency emphasis making the sample sound normal again Actually all samplers do this but the Roland did it intentionally with a much greater effect than normal What this means is that if you transferred normal 16 bit wavedata from any other source to the Roland and then played it through the Rol
58. ir interface coorporate grpahics and web site SampleTank may not be the sampler of samplers but it sure looks like it File Format A SampleTank Instrument unit is made up of three files the sth the header file sti the Instrument file and stw the samples files The stw only contains sample data nothing else Architecture Description The downside for the SampleTank user is that there is no editor So the user at least with the current interface does not know what SampleTank is capable of architecturally Well we ll tell you An Instrument is made up of one Keymap which contains 2 Oscillators in other words two sample references which can be mono or stereo It s parameter makeup is standard with tunings and ADSR envelopes although they are shared by both Oscillators The modulation matrix however is very extensive and modular more advanced than most Translation Description This is another square peg in round hole type of thing It is entirely possible that an import format can overwhelm the single Keymap format of SampleTank so multiple sets of sth sti Stw will be created put inside a single directory This may make duplicate samples but hey what can you do Comments There is rumor of SmapleTank 2 0 we hope they remove the restrictions and open it up to unrestricted capability per CPU of course An editor would be nice too Page 61 Installation Installation Translator comes on a sing
59. ive format Page 41 All About ASPI Windows NT 2000 and XP Microsoft and Adaptec Divorce After and during Windows 95 98 Adaptec continued to update the ASPI including support for new CD readers and writers and other improvements However apparently Microsoft wanted to move away from external non Microsoft technologies so with the NT type OS s NT 2000 XP ASPI is not included as part of the OS Microsoft includes a minimal ASPI called the Pass Through interface in these OS s This doesn t use the standard ASPI calls so in other words ASPI is not native to these OS s Adaptec then adopted the policy of selling the newer ASPI as part of the EZ SCSI packages They changed this recently and now make ASPI puiblicly available off their web site although they grudgingly say it s a courtesy to Adaptec owners Installing ASPI on Windows NT 2000 or XP Get all the applicable ASPI files You can get them from our web site or they are avaialble on our updaters After installing run the aspichk exe file from within the Translator folder you should see this dialog details and look may be different Ai iret ieee Were a kij Adapier ASPI Winduws ST Pel cae Vcd bhh i pec a Ha SAE LD A ee ed m gy yema iste oP gee an Larr d Pina i Fi P PLS Dib imne Mth i it a inii mies D EER L irk iG mii MH wiet pg imig i iim E SOP Dos mapei rd ie eed a li eee oe E hai edad bop hn cleterctee Also Translator will s
60. la EXS 24 is a cross platform sampler If you are intending to write EXS 24 files for use in the Mac it can be more convenient to write to Mac type of files which include Motorola byte order exs files and aif files instead of wav files However the EXS 24 should be able to read both types of files with no problems Default Intel Create directory for translated exs and wav files This will create a directory that will store your translated exs and wav only in central repository is not checked in a single created directory based on the source name If NOT checked and the central repository option is not checked Translator will simply write the exs and wav aiff file s in the destina tion directory Default unchecked Write WAV AIFF files to a central repository If this is checked you can select a central directory where all your EXS sample files wav and aiff are saved to and pointed to by the written exs file Default unchecked Kurzweil Options Tab Kurzweil Drive Exception This lists the drive that Translator will ignore when scanning the DOS devices when starting up or Refreshing This is necessary since several Kurzweil CD ROM s can cause Windows to lock up due to the quasi DOS nature of the format For more information see the miscellaneous topic Kurzweil CD ROM Drive support Recycle Options Tab Normalize Samples during translation Since Recycle uses sample slices many single samples can be less th
61. lator will bypass this check and only qualify a pair of mono files as stereo on the most basic level listed below Akai If two samples contain L or R as the last two characters of the sample name Note Akai usually puts L or R in the llth and 12th character Excep tion the S3000 plain uses space L and space R Additionally Pulsar varies by writing L R as just the last two chars regardless of name length Page 16 Roland Emphasis DeEmphasis Filtering Roland If two samples contain L or R as the last two characters of the sample name Actually Roland uses the ASCii number 127 as the dash indicating stereo and the regular ASCui number 45 as a dash within the name Ensoniq If two samples use consecutive sample numbers are on consectutive Layers and the Stereo Layer Link is ON on both layers Kurzweil If two samples are found to exist in a KeyMap where a Layer in a Program uses those two samples in a stereo KeyMap pair Whew Please note that this can result in a single sample being stereo 1zed if a Layer uses the same KeyMap on both sides of it s stereo pair SoundFont Principally if the Link parameter is set in the Sample chunk to another sample but also if two samples contain L or R as the last two characters of the sample name Non looped dual mono waves deemed as a possible stereo pair are always combined even if the sample sizes are different regardless of the Combine Unconditionally setting Aga
62. le CD ROM formatted for the PC containing several compressed files and one SETUP EXE program Put this CD ROM in your PC s CD ROM Drive Insert the CD ROM to start the Installation process If it does not start use the Add Remove Programs in the Control Panel go to the CD ROM and run the setup exe program From there follow the prompts it is self explanatory Once your program is installed go to the Start button click the Programs menu option go to the Translator Program Group and cluck on the Translator icon The program should fire up It s a very good idea to update your program immediately it is unlikely that your CD ROM version contains the latest upgrade If the program has problems at any point don t hesitate to call or write Chicken Systems Co at contact addresses listed in this manual Registering and Updating To confirm your ownership of Translator you need two codes an Unlock Code which is listed below and a KeyCode Once you register Translator with us via the Web at www chickensys com translator register or by fax at 360 838 7689 you will receive a KeyCode You can run Translator for 5 days after installation without the KeyCode and after that it will time out Please keep your Unlock Code and KeyCode handy you need it to upgrade You can update at www chickensys com translator userupdates just follow the prompts and upgrading your software is easy Here is your Unlock Code and KeyCode
63. les that come with Translator This option when checked disables this check Default unchecked No Ensoniq check Same as above except there are certain files necessary for only Ensoniq translations This option when checked disables this check Default unchecked Confirm DOS bulk When this is checked when you use the Convert all files in X right click option Translator will prompt you when it finds a proper file and attempts a Translation Default checked Recurse Sub Dir s When checked when you use the Convert all files in X right click option Translator will not only attempt to translate all applicable files in the noted directory but all the files in the sub directories below Default unchecked Prompt Drive Label When checked Translator will prompt you for a Drive Label when formatting a Roland or Ensoniq disk or Virutal Drive Otherwise Translator will use the default values or the values entered into the Options Tab Default checked Preferred Tab If you have a specific translation you always do you can bypass the dialog box that always comes up when attempting a translation Any is the default here but if you check one or more things here you can limit your choices for simplicity Drives Tab This lists the current drives on your system and let s you override the assumed read and write characteristics This feature was mainly instituted to support Magneto Optical drives that report themselves a
64. me for the S 1000 and S 3000 Partitions are the same for both formats A Volume can be either S 1000 or S 3000 and of course Programs and Samples can be either way as well Even if the files are different it s a moot point since the S 1000 OS 4 4 sees and reads both When you format a Akai disk it formats to only the single Akai format since it only writes headers and partitions not anything else However when you write a Volume or other file Program Sample whatever Translator checks your file type option in Options and writes the appropriate type volume or file Basically the S 1000 and the S 3000 are interchangeable to some extent The only total incompatibility worth mentioning is that if you can t write an S 3000 Program with more than 128 Samples attached to it to a S 1000 Volume Another interesting twist is that many other samplers such as Emu although they can read S 1000 and S 3000 Programs they can t read S 3000 Programs which are in S 1000 Volumes Architecture Description The single Instrument unit on the Akai is the Program This holds the parameters and the pointers to the wavesamples to be played The Program file does not hold the samples them selves A Program holds a mapping system called Keygroups A Keygroup contains a group of parameters and can reference up to 4 samples in structures called Zones It s not documented very well but Keygroups can overlap or layer on top of one another making for a ve
65. mesys Gigasampler took the music industry by storm proclaiming no more looping since its sampler software played endless waves technology developed and licensed from Rockwell directly from disk Since disk space is sort of infinite the idea was that no looping is necessary since memory did not have to be conserved Even so Gigasampler does provide looping and that is good Gigasampler uses the DOS disk format since it is a Windows computer program Nemesys then expanded their product line to include the Gigastudio which is essentially Giga 2 0 It has an improved interface added functionality and greater polyphony Gi Gigasampler and GigaStudio are very similar we will refer to them as Giga for the remainder of this article Nemesys was later bought by Tascam certainly a new chapter to Giga is about to be written Architecture Description The basic Instrument unit on Giga is the Instrument or gig file A gig file can hold up to 128 Instruments they hold the parameters and the wavedata to be played An Instrument holds a maximum 4 GigaStudio maximum 8 keymaps arranged in a horizontal mapping system called Regions same as a Keygroup on Akai samplers except they do not overlap You can have a Region for every key on the keyboard and a Region can specify up to 4 8 for GigaStudio samples called Layers Stereo interleaved samples are supported they take up two Layers of course but a Region cannot hold both Stereo an
66. mu cleverly detached the file format specification in version 2 0 trying to encourage other manufacturers to make equipment that would use SoundFont as their native file format That almost happened but in a backwards sort of way Many people mostly amateurs since that is the basis of the soundcard market started sharing and making available their SoundFonts so there became a sizable library of them Then other developers of other sound generating equipment and software saw it as marketable to include SoundFont reading capability on them Reality is a good example of this SoundFont files carry the extension sf2 although SoundFont 1 0 files have the extension sbk Translator does not deal with SoundFont so that will be exempted from this discussion A SoundFont sf2 file is self contained carrying all the parameters and wavedata it needs No pointers are used to external files Apple rising again as a valid computer company is adopting SoundFonts into QuickTime 5 This will be a great boost to the format as Apple needs this type of operation A good example of the portability of SoundFont is that it is the only way to get into Reason NN XT Since Propellerheads does not release the file format of Reason it is encrypted and thus is not reverse engineerable by mortals this is the only way in Architecture Description A SoundFont is capable of several things it is unique because whatever you need in the file you can include a
67. n elup SAT N E See Emu Emsoniq Foland Show Common Diabo D052005 M Combine Stereo SCS Buller pean Object Look Ahasi Combine Unconditional M Nonertcalical check cgi Fe Erase Teme Fies aan Show SCSATAF m p a cave M No Ensoniq check FF Show Image Files ee Conlin OOS Bulk Thon Denizin sanpa Edie pi eps icoofS cod exe BI O Reourss Suhrs General Tab Show Common Dialog when DOS gt DOS Let s say you want to turn BRASS SF2 a SoundFont into a Gigasampler instrument If this option is checked a Save As common dialog will appear defaulting to the name BRASS GIG but at least giving you the option of renaming Unchecking this option will assume you want the name to be BRASS GIG and write it with that name If the named file exists Translator will ask you if you want to overwrite Default unchecked Object Look Ahead In the Explorer model if there are objects underneath a node for example a directory there will be a sign next to the object enabling you to click it and drop down the hierarchy to view them Typically an Explorer is programmed where you read the disk only when requested but to display the sign Translator has to read the contents anyway to find out if there are any objects contained underneath which is the Look Ahead You can uncheck these options to speed up the reading of objects then every node will have a sign until you look underneath the node if there are no objects the
68. nd normal again What this means is that if you transferred normal 16 bit wavedata from any other source to the Roland and then played it through the Roland it will sound duller since the outputs would be de emphasizing the high end Conversely any Roland data you play through another medium will sound tinny since the frequency emphasis is not being filtered The solution is to mimic the Roland input filters on the way in to the Roland and mimic them again on the way out Translator contains a high quality Deemphasis and Emphasis when importing into Roland Filter that mimics the Roland samplers behavior Page 43 Windows XP 2000 NT Support turned off for your CD ROM drive Auto Insert Notification is the process where Windows detects anew CD ROM has been inserted and it runs the autorun inf file af it exists in the root directory Turning this off stops Windows from automatically reading the drive once it is inserted Of course on boot up Translator tries to read every drive letter on the system To make Translator avoid reading the drive on the DOS level go to the Options tab and set the Kurzweil Drive Exception box to the drive letter you want to avoid Translator will then avoid that Drive Letter when displaying DOS drives but Translator will attempt to detect the drive when looking for Kurzweil devices The Kurzweil drive will then show up in the SCSI ATAPI Drives area instead and not in the DOS area Lastly and it g
69. nd specify If you do not it does not need to be included in the file However this does not mean a SoundFont is capable of EVERYTHING The SoundFont shows its heritage of being attached to the EMU8000 by offering a limited amount of parameters the envelopes in particular are primitive It is not a good idea to consider a SoundFont the universal file format that can conceivably carry every parameter and hardware platform offered The first level of the SoundFont is a Preset A Preset can reference one or more Instruments An Instrument can reference one or more Zones which are keyranges with a certain set of proper ties The SoundFont format is clever as it doesn t require all the parameters to be included in the file if a parameter entry is missing it simply assumes the default Page 50 Kurzweil first ROM based sampling keyboard to successfully reproduce the full complexity of acoustic instrument sounds the K250 When the K 250 was introduced in 1983 the music industry was astounded by its ability to emulate a piano strings choirs drums and other acoustic instruments with extraordinary accuracy Ray being a genius in his own regard garnered engineers around him to develop the K150 additive synthesis machine and other technologically advanced machines But these machines did not sell well in the popular market as the K250 did and mass sales is the key for sales and stability as a profitable company So Kurzweil manufactured the
70. nformation is not translated and it has to be done one by one In addition the ASR X can translate Akai and Roland formats but only the wavedata and the keymap arrangement on the keyboard This is also the case with many other manufacturers translations they want to expand the reach of their product but have not had the resources to truly get the job done right Translator improves on this situation for your benefit What if I don t like the translations that Translator performs What if I spot a bug or a obvious translation error Call or e mail us and give us SPECIFIC information on the problem Translator also has an extensive bug solving apparatus that allow us to diagnosis any problem We listen and may upload or e mail you an update within 48 hours You haven t mentioned a WORD of my desired format Make a request at translator chickensys com Page 35 Options Emu Tab Write to Unique Program Number When checked as you translate an Akai Program into a Volume Translator will check all the Programs in that Volume and make sure the incoming Program is set to a Program Number that no other program has Default checked Bulk Options Akai Volume gt When translating an Akai Volume into something else this toggles whether each Program is treated separately or if the whole Volume can be treated as a single entity if the destination supports it Default Single Combine Programs with sample Program Number When checked
71. nt and go from there It works fairly well Comments Recycle has been wildly popular and has certainly found a niche in the industry Several programs are similar such as WaveSurgeon and Acid Reason is also deservedly popular one prominent sound developer prefers to natively work in that format Pooh on them for encoding their wavedata Destination Single Sound Files WAV AIFF Sound Designer Mac SFIL Triton Pulsar MPC Files Histories and File Formats A Single Sound File is simply a file that is designed to specifcally hold one or more channels of sample data usually meant to play simultaneously It holds basic sample specific parameters such as sample rate channel amount mono or stereo usually and how many bits it is They often store looping info names unity notes and even key range and velocity settings Some even specify the ability to write application specific chunks in the file in case a company wants to refer to something only applying to that app and many do A WAV file is also called a RIFF file Resource Interchange File Format The specification comes from Microsoft to work on their Wintel platforms An AIFF file Audio Interchange File Format is functionally identical to a WAV file only it s Apple spec to work on Macs Sound Designer files are a Digidesign creation There is a SD1 and SD2 format They are not very portable as they use the Mac only concept of a resource fork and can t be moved or
72. oblem For interesting reading please see the All About ASPI article the next part It explains the reasons behind the need for ASPI and why it s not included in the modern Windows OS s Page 20 All About ASPI All About ASPI Overview ASPI short for Adaptec SCSI Protocol Interface was developed by Adaptec a leader in SCSI technology back in the early 1990 s The purpose was to create a standard interface in which programs could communicate with Adaptec s SCSI cards that they were manufacturing Adaptec soon became the leader in SCSI cards both by making good products and by buying out the competition By the time Windows 95 came out Adaptec was the only game in town Because of this Microsoft included ASPI also call an ASPI layer in the Windows 95 operating system install Windows 98 and ME also include it Because of this ASPI isn t only SCSI it also enables program to access non SCSI drives such as IDE ATAPI CD ROM s and ZipDrives You cannot access parallel port USB and more protocols using the ASPI interface What this has to do with Translator ASPI is critically important to Translator because it uses it to communicate low level with devices this is how it can read disk formats other than DOS What exactly is an ASPI layer The ASPI protocol is primarily based on one file wnaspi32 dll winaspi dll is the 16 bit version we ll avoid talk about this file for now This is NOT the ASPI layer There are som
73. oes backward from the Loop End to the Sample Start then loops in a reverse manner from the Loop Start back to the Sample Start Akai Supports multiple loops Page 18 Kurzweil CD ROM Support If the destination sampler does not support any of these modes Translator compensates by altering the data to exactly simulate the loop as specified The exception would be multiple loops if the destination does not support them Regarding Loop Release loop mode where a loop exists only before the note off command and the remainder of the loop at that point of time and the rest of the data is played is only supported between samplers that support it which are Akai Ensoniq and Roland Otherwise it is translated as a simple forward loop Kurzweil CD ROM Support Modern Kurzweil s use the standard DOS disk format but in the early days pre version 2 or 3 Operating System it wasn t quite that way The early Kurzweil s wrote a proprietary format that is based on the DOS disk format so close in fact that Windows often times doesn t agree with it Upon sticking a Kurzweil CD ROM into PC you might see any of the following within Windows Explorer or Translator for that matter Normal response you see all files and can navigate all the directories Blank response no files are seen but Windows Explorer shows the disk like it s empty but formatted Not formatted Windows complains that the disk is not formatted Crash Windows
74. oes without saying DON T go into other programs on your computer and try to read the drive Also other program may try to read your drive without asking so be careful If you are working with a susceptible Kurzweil CD ROM ZipDisk or other removable medium we suggest removing as soon as you are finished working with it In fact maybe a good suggestion 1s to write all the Kurzweil files to a normal DOS drive and ace the older format Windows XP 2000 NT Support Translator is fully compatible on Windows XP 2000 and NT 4 0 However these OS s and Virtual PC on the Mac do not install an ASPI layer upon operating system install This is important to the working of Translator Chicken Systems has licensed ASPI from Adaptec and make it available on their web site updaters Since you will be updating immediately after installing your install CD ROM you will have a chance to install ASPI yourself On the updater after the patching there will be a checkbox option to install ASPI Check this it will install ASPI for you Only for XP 2000 NT not Win98 or ME Note if you cannot see proprietary e g Akai Roland Emu etc CD s or drives within Translator even after installing ASPI this may be because of a unknown bug we discovered at the time of this writing To remedy shut down Translator go into your Translator folder and find the file wnaspi32_nero dll Rename it to wnaspi32 dll Restart Translator This will solve that pr
75. oon be available with code that makes ASPI not mandatory to have on your system to run Translator at least if you are running NT 2000 or XP However it should be said that while the Pass Through interface is adequate and does the job at least as far as Translator is concerned ASPI is still a much better technology and we recommend that you buy it EZ SCSI 5 0 from Adaptec and install it on your system Macintosh Indexes Translator can read Macintosh CD s and disks whereas the PC cannot The most common file type you ll want to deal with are SampleCell files although Translator can read EXS 24 HALion Kontakt Battery Reaktor MESA and all the Single Sound files wav AIFF Sound Designer etc More files will be available soon Page 22 Macintosh Indexes SampleCell Banks and Instruments and others such as MESA HALion etc work as a collection of files a Bank file referes to Instrument and Sample files and a Sample Cell Instrument deals with other Sample files The SampleCell Bank or Instrument needs to know where it s supporting files are on the disk it s on Normally as with other formats most noteably the EXS 24 this information is stored within the Bank or Instrument file itself as a Path statement For example let s say SampleCell Instrument Brass stored in the directory Instru ments Concert Solo Instruments is using two samples trumpet and trombone both stored in directory Samples Concert Solo Instruments
76. or is not checked no what comes up is something like Sample 23 to reference the sample If you click on this THEN Translator will go and get the sample name However if this is checked Translator takes the time at the beginning to go out and get all the names Default unchecked Adjust to Ignore Fades Emu programs Fades within the KeyRange and Velocity parameters Sometimes in a translation you do not want these to be considered for polyphony issues mainly In fact when you have a destination format such as Giga which restricts the amount of Layers you can implement this may be desirable Checking these causes Translator to ignore the Fade values Default unchecked Ensoniq Options Tab File Type Effect Type The EPS and ASR 10 formats are almost identical but what essentially makes them different is the type of effect they contain This option parameter dictates what type of file and thus what effect type is created when translating into Ensoniq The combo box below dictates which effect algorithm is written Default ASR 10 Page 28 Options Roland Tab Drive Label This is the Drive Label that is written by default to a drive when you format it with Translator However if the Prompt Drive Label option in Setup Option is checked the user will be prompted during formatting Default TLR 001 Roland Options Tab Strip 3 Character Category Preferences The Roland for the first 4 characters in a object name lists a
77. ost anything HALion can natively import Akai and Emu files and well as SoundFonts and of course WAV and AIFF files Oh and also LM4 scripts Disk and File Format DOS format of course HALion uses fxp files to store individual program data and fxb files to store whole Banks a memory setup with 128 Programs Ironically both of these are called Effect Banks since when are these effects HALion uses wav files and AIFF files to store sample data Page 51 Instrument Sample Management sample in your editor and it says sample rate not supported or something similar You manually adjust the sample rate in your editor and do your edits and then you ll have to switch the sample rate back to where you found it and then save your edits That s a hassle so Translator does this switching for you It switches to either 44 1k or 22 05 whichever is closer upon sending the sample to the external editor and switches it back upon receiption of the sample But what if you want to edit the sample rate in the first place within the external editor The Options dialog Setup tab has a switch called Sample Rate Non Adjust this defeats this adjustment The default setting of this parameter in checked so you have to uncheck it yourself Instrument Sample Management Translator isn t just a conversion utility it is the ULTIMATE SAMPLER TOOL for your sampler Principally Translator supports these functions for management Addin
78. ou could either read the drive see a blank drive or even have the drive crash the computer Translator deals with these issues and enables you to read any disk with Kurzweil files on it See the miscellaneous Kurzweil CD ROM Support article for more information However newer versions K2000 version 3 and all K2500 2600 versions adhere to the true modern DOS format fully The file format uses the krz k25 and k26 extensions All work similarly Architecture Description The basic Instrument unit is a Program which holds normally 3 Layers which can contain a mono or stereo Keymap so in a way you can address 6 Layers which can have up to 127 samples assigned to them Kurzweil addresses 16 MIDI Channels and one can be designated the drum channel A Program can hold up to 32 Layers but only on the drum channel You can also make Setups which are sets of 3 Programs Kurzweil s are probably the most programmable and versatile sampler platforms that exist You can program curves and playing styles However the architecture tends to be overly complex and clunky Page 49 DOS Counterpart Files you however in two instances if you inputted too many characters or if you typed lower and or upper case characters and the pbject format only supports upper case as in Ensoniq and Akai formats DOS Counterpart Files If all samplers used the DOS disk format initially instead of all these proprietary disk formats that
79. ou s Legal Notices Appendix A Sampler Overview Akai Pulsar MESA Akai S 5000 Series Akai MPC Series Roland S 7x XV 5080 DJ 70 Emu E3 E3X ESi Emu EOS Ensoniq EPS ASR 10 EnsoniqASR X Korg Trinity Triton Kurzweil SoundFont Steinberg HALion Gigasampler Studio Emagic EXS 24 Reality NI Reaktor Battery Kontakt SampleCell Bitheadz Unity DS 1 P heads Reason Recycle Single Sound Files Yamaha SampleTank VSampler VSamp SamplerChan Page 30 Page 31 Page 32 Page 34 Page 36 Page 38 Page 39 Page 40 Page 40 Page 40 Page 42 Page 43 Page 44 Page 45 Page 46 Page 47 Page 48 Page 50 Page 51 Page 52 Page 53 Page 54 Page 55 Page 56 Page 57 Page 58 Page 59 Page 60 Page 61 Page 62 Page 63 Page 63 Introduction Introduction Translator is the realization of a dream to have a universal translator for all the crazy professional sampler sound formats that are offered Akai Yamaha SampleCell Roland Ensoniq GigaStudio etc Not only does Translator convert sounds but it is a excellent sampler tool to organize edit and catalog your sounds to make your work easier Please read through this manual thoroughly you will be amazed what esoteric uses Translator can have for you There are a couple of reasons for the myriad of sampler formats Competition Part of the appeal of a particular piece of musical equipment is the sounds that it produces Just by nature one of the si
80. ough it is not the same as in Giga or other samplers it simply plays the sample from disk and does not load a tiny bit into memory and then join it together with disk sourced material later Thus the latency is higher than what is usually acceptable Also you can reference wavs externally or include them in the file File Format VSampler uses the extension vsb and as said above either references wav files or stores them internally within the file Comments VSampler is definitely underrated It s download only and inexpensive price probably have contributed to it s non pro status but that s a marketing statement not a reflection of it s production power We ll have to see what v3 is capable of Page 62 SampleTank Destination History From Italy IK Multimedia starting making plug ins for computer based platforms The T Racks which they still sell is an amazing mastering software In 2000 they came out with SampleTank a VST based sample playback machine with the emphasis on ease of use and built in sounds that were great It became popular with people disenchanted with the big slow memory hogging other VST samplers such as people who use Digital Performer SampleTank is playback only you can t make your own sounds The one exception is their ST Convertor program which imports Akai Programs And of course Translator imports everything as well IK Multimedia should be noted for their skilled artwork with the
81. r the reason that it helps make a Hard Thing Easy Use it it Il help The Defaults Are Good for 99 of the cases See the Options dialog There s lot s of Options there If you are confused by them do the simple thing ignore it There generally isn t any options in there that are completely mandatory necessary to swtich or set to enable things to go well In 99 of the cases you should be able to stick in a CD drag it over go and eat a sandwich and come back with a bunch of translations But if you need them the options are there Call or E mail if you have questions or problems When something goes wrong and with a Hard Thing that is inevitable that can make that Hard Thing Hard So we make ourselves available you can call us with toll free 1 800 technical support If you want to e mail us we ll respond within 24 hours guaranteed If we aren t the best support in the business at least that s where we want to be in order to make a hard thing easy Send Files if there is a problem Nothing is better for diagnostics than the actual source file the user is operating on In Translator you can send us any source file you are looking at See Sending Files for more information We ll take care of it within 24 hours See it s an Easy Thing Page 3 Yamaha Architecture Description A Single Sample file holds one wavedata chunk This can be mono or stereo Stereo is usually interleaved the exception bein
82. r words on a Akai S1000 if the Loop Marker is 54283 the Akai will actually loop on 54272 the lesser multiple of 64 even though the display may not say so When translating into Akai Pulsar MESA format Translator automatically compen sates for the situation by shifting the sample upward adding information at the start of the sample and incrementing the Sample Start parameter Page 23 Appendix A Sampler Overview Appendix A Sampler Overview The following section is less about Translator and more about the different formats that you ll likely be translating to and from We have found that you will be a better translator er if you know a certain amount about the formats and besides it s fun to learn a bit about the history of all of this Destination Akai Pulsar and MESA OO AKAL sine Disk and File Formats Translator supports the Akai S 1000 and S 3000 disk and file formats Both of these are quite similar the S 3000 format is just an extension of the S 1000 s with the data chunks a little larger along with different file type numbers In fact Akai updated the S 1000 s OS after the S 3000 came out so that it would read the S 3000 s format without the additional options of course but it could read it nevertheless S 3000 Volumes are quite a bit more capable they can store up to 510 objects Programs Samples Multi s other The S 1000 Volume could only store 125 Objects The Akai disk format is the sa
83. r you to use Page 1 VSampler Destination VSampler History VSampler has it s roots in inexpensive shareware lore selling for less than 100 Out since 1999 it has steadily progressed into an innovative and sharp sampler It claims it was the first sequencer sampler plugin Another VST based design VSampler looks similar to HALion or we should really say that HALion looks similar to it since it came out after it It s interface is a nice looking brushed silver It is only for PC though there is no Mac version Sometimes VSamp a completely differetn sampler for Mac only is confused with VSampler They are completely different with different authors aaltona gtatesdned lie lan VSampler was also the first in bring DXi Sonor support into it s feature set We don t have the facts on this but we suppose most Sonor users use VSampler in some sense As of this writing Version 3 is in public beta test with this claim VSampler 3 will define new standards once again bringing you innovative features not found in any other sampler neither hardware nor software great visual support for sound editing incredible ease of use in combination with existing soundlibraries and an unprec edented level of plugin integration and modulation power We ll see ie Architecture Description VSampler has the usual common parameter set fairly advanced for every zone A unique innovation is disk streaming alth
84. rameters Three other file types deal with the sample information A ksf file holds the sample wavedata information A kmp file stores key mapping information of any number of ksf files Finally a ksc file references one or more kmp files to load When loading a PCG you have the option of loading also the same named ksc file too This is the standard way of loading a whole instrument into the Triton Native Import Formats WAV AIFF and Akai S 1000 and S 3000 programs through it s SCSI port None of the program parameters are imported and the Korg only creates the ksc kmp ksf combination it s up to you to create the pcg which can be difficult Korg also documents many of their file formats in the manual That s cool For us makes our job easier Translation Comments Translator uses a complex algorithm that figures out how the destination object should be translated Since a Triton Program only can hold 4 or sometimes less layers of sound Translator calculates whether it will fit in one Program preferred or if several Programs will have to be made and put together as one Combi If the latter is the case the Programs will be named combi name A then combi name B etc Since the Triton has effects a simple non instrusive Reverb is automatically programmed in Future versions of Translator may allow programming of effects ability to program the translated settings and translation of incoming objects tha
85. ry flexible but under used architecture Page 40 Legal Notices Keyboard Magazine Amy Miller Craig Anderton John Krogh Electronic Musician Robin Boyce Trubitt Dennis Miller David Rubin Q Up Arts Douglas Morton SampleHeads Chris Lacinak Spectrasonics Eric Persing and Nick Manson Sonic Reality Dave Kerzner We got our start in business thanks to some special people at the Transonig Hacker Floppy Disk Support Floppy Disk Support Actually this a misnomer Translator does not support proprietary floppy formats but we do include in the Translator package FOUR programs that can read several different formats of floppy disks These programs come unsupported so the only information you get is the stuff provided here Please do not ask any questions of support on these products the documentation contained within are substantive enough to answer basic questions Eric Geislinger and Jane Talisman a monthly independent magazine published since 1985 and just recently went out of publication It only seems days ago when we had a Mirage and we picked up our first Hacker and read it cover to cover Legal Notices 1998 2002 Chicken Systems Inc All rights reserved All Chicken System products mentioned are trademarked by Chicken Systems All other brand and product names are copyrighted and trademarked by their particular holders Translator is the sole property of Chicken Systems Inc You are granted a license to use Transla
86. s Portamento is a nice touch One lousy thing most of the great program parameters such as the Filter Envelopes and LEO s are GLOBAL within the Instrument one setting applies to all Zones But at least the Zones provide the basic parameters such as tuning velocity and looping while the Groups provide special adjustment parameters for the amplitude ADSR the Filter Cutoff and Rez Translation Comments Due to this global nature of most of the EXS 24 parameters Translator has some special algorithms to distribute the Group adjustment parameters accurately Also a particular param eter will only be written in the Global section if it applies to every Zone in a accurate way Some parameters have greater tolerance for varied values some have none Translator figures these for you Lastly Translator writes as few Zones and Groups as possible combining as many connecting Zones and identical Groups as possible Import Formats The EXS 24 envelopes are also a bit unique they behave similar to the SoundFont rate based envelopes The rates change depending on what the levels are despite that absolute times appear on the EXS interface Translator accurately tracks these envelopes EXS 24 Instruments that is exs files are only seen by the EXS 24 if they are in the Sampler Instruments folder within the Logic application directory Translator provides a special folder called EXS Instruments which represents this folder if it exists
87. s not full blown instruments There are several instruments that use this Ensoniq ASR X Emu samplers ESi and up Kurzweil and of course Peavey Akai and Roland are strangely missing from this picture as they use proprietary methods to transfer sounds through SCSI Akai surprisingly is the leader in complete SCSI compatibility see Rubber Chicken Software s Millennium product The Ensoniq EPS and ASR 10 family almost had SCSI transfer ability but the OS didn t implement this very well and performance was erratic or nonexistent Many samplers support SMDI although it is mostly for transferring single samples back and forth In our opinion SMDI is under utilised in this regard but we d have to argue with the manufacturers about this and we don t want to OK on to Translator Translator supports SMDI Applications such as SoundForge Peak and other pro apps support SMDI and are useful for taking waves out of sam plers and putting them back Translator goes a step further and integrates SMDI communication within the powerful Translator interface You can take files off disk CD are fly them directly into your SMD I supported sampler Of course this means only waves not whoel mapped instruments SMD If Translator detects a SMDI supported sampler F E oMDI Devices it appears on the interface like this Hag AKAI EMIS2000 SAMPLER Page 9 Seet Systems Reality resonance two LFO s and the standard complement of function
88. s since the file formats we are concerned with often contain many separate items For example an Ensoniq file contains up to 8 Layers and up to 127 wave objects with or without wavedata You can open up an Ensoniq instrument in that way and view the internal contents Same with many other formats such as Giga files gig Akai ak1 or ak3 files SoundFonts and many others Also you will notice that only pertinent sound files appear on the screen This is to drastically declutter the screen If every single file was viewable that would be quite confusing Lastly you will notice that there is a Desktop icon and a My Computer icon These are just for show and don t do anything There are also no other frills down the line such as Network Neighborhood Control Panel Recycle Bin etc In fact don t think as Translator so much as an Explorer replacement as it is a platform in which you can translate files or drives while seeing everything that exists on your computer at the same time The whole concept is this you can view all the pertinent Sound and Sample Drives and Files on your screen enabling you to move that is Translate them around to your desire Page 6 Special Features Virtual Drives Special Features Virtual Drives I Femovabie Disk Ms PH tual Coss TET Sy Aka mg Pe Pain HITSSTABS a fe TRIMMA You can make Virtual Drives with Translator Virtual Drives are really single large file
89. s CD ROM Drives normally 2048 byte sector size but need 512 byte sized sectors Normally most users should ignore this tab but if you need it it s here Akai Options Tab Translate to This selects which Akai file format you will translate to If S 000 is selected files written to Akai disk will be translated as S 1000 files and ak1 files will be made if translating to DOS and vis versa with S 3000 This option also determines what type of Volumes will created when you create them Default S1000 Auto Names Volumes When an Akai Volume needs to be created Translator automatically creates a Volume based on the suggested input name without a prompt from you But if this is checked Translator will prompt you efault upchecked Paige 27 FAQ So say I use Translator to do a bunch of translations and say they are OK When another build comes out and offers a better translation do I have to do all my translations over Probably not all of them but perhaps certain ones This is a good point and is why we attempt the best possible translation the first time around It is also may be a reason that a specific translation hasn t been released to the public as yet Page 36 FAQ FAQ Does Translator support floppy disks Probably not why are you using floppy disks anyway No really we ship two DOS programs with Translator EPSDisk for Ensoniq and AkaiDisk for Akai We do not support them thus we do not provide
90. s you create on your PC s hard drive using Translator but within Translator they appear as SCSI ATAPI Drives formatted with whatever proprietary format you want Akai Roland Ensoniq Emu Virtual Drives are usually used to compile say an Emu disk and then burn it onto a CD ROM for direct use with your Emu sampler However there are many other applications for the feature Now Translator does not burn CD s but most CD burning programs support writing raw data images which is what Virtual Drives are Check your burning software documentation or their tech support for information on how to burn these type of files NOTE Since we are not equipped to support other company s products we are not qualified to answer any questions on how your specific burning software burns raw data images So please don t ask instead read below We do want to help so we ll tell you what we use We use an incredibly simple FREE DOS command line program from Goldenhawk called FILE2CD You can download it for free from Goldenhawk s Web Site select the download called MS DOS 32 bit console version The FILE2CD program is in this package along with some other helpful burning utilities The current URL as we write is www goldenhawk com download_body htm You can create a Virtual Drive in two ways Make a New Virtual Drive Click on the menu item Tools click on Virtual Drives click on New Translator will create an Image of your specifi
91. stacked on top of each other This was common practice in the S 1000 so common that Akai implemented this feature as a Multi in the S 3000 whereas all you had to do was to select the Multi and that would play combina tions of Programs together DOS Counterparts ak1 ak3 Akai complete file includes Programs and Samples We developed this format 1 being the S 1000 and 3 being S 3000 We did this in order to integrate Programs and Samples into a single file An ak file contains one or more Program files and all the Samples associated with it along with a Volume header which ties them together S3p prg wav Mesa files wav includes the sample data Akai has a fairly good program called MESA which can communicate to the S 3000 through SCSI It does a good job at it really When it gets a object or file from the Akai you can save it on the computer as a s3p file with wavedata stored as associated wav files This is with MESA II with earlier versions the extension was prg but the file is practically the same The S3p simply has all the sys ex strings that MESA uses to communicate spliced together basically NOTE Chicken System s affiliate company Rubber Chicken Software Co sells an excellent program for the Akai called Millennium which is an improvement over MESA and is ex tremely effective See www chickensys com mil for more info p S Sts wav Pulsar files The Creamware Pulsar SamplePlayer and SamplePlayerF
92. stems universal sampler file convertor and sampler tool Introduction Installation How To Make A Hard Thing Easy Basic Operation Drag Method Right Click What s in a File Special Features Virtual Drives WavePlayer Property Sheets SMDI Direct Sampler Comm Single Sound Mapping Edit Any Sample Inst Sample Management Adding Objects Deleting Objects Combining Inserting Objects Renaming Objects DOS Counterpart files Formatting Disks Miscellaneous Topics Stereo Wavedata Support Roland De Emphasis Alternative Looping Kurzweil CD ROM Support Windows XP 2000 NT Support All About ASPI Macintosh Indexes Akai Looping Boundaries Floppy Disk Support Options Dialog General Tab Preferred Tab Drives Tab Akai Options Tab Emu Options Tab Ensoniq Options Tab Roland Options Tab Giga Options Tab Reaktor Options Tab ACID Options Tab Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4 Page 5 Page 6 Page 7 Page 8 Page 9 Page 10 Page 11 Page 12 Page 13 Page 14 Page 15 Page 16 Page 16 Page 17 Page 18 Page 19 Page 20 Page 21 Page 22 Page 23 Page 24 Page 25 Page 27 Page 28 Page 29 Page 30 Table of Contents Table of Contents SampleCell Options Tab SoundFont Options Tab EXS 24 Options Tab Kurzweil Options Tab Recycle Options Tab TroubleShooting and Support General Info Sending Files Additional Notes Contact Information FAQ Update Policy Final Notes Credits Thank Y
93. supports the map so we will limit our discussion to that The map file holds the basic parameters and wavedata for areas up and down the keyboard It is basic at this point but it support Root Key looping volume pan and couple of other things Interestingly any internal samples are stored as 32 bit floating point numbers Architecture Description Battery The single Instrument unit on Battery is the kit It is interestingly a XML file so anyone can look at it and conceivably edit it Standard fare the restof the way ADSR envelope common sample editing functions etc It is interesting that there is sample editing onboard with the wave showing and everything Even here you can see the development of what was coming next Architecture Description Kontakt It s obvious that the NI people wanted to make the ultimate sampler interface There is a browser that can be hidden which you can load sounds You can build your instrument from scratch and put in what you want but you aren t given a single set of fixed parameters from the beginning And the parameters are no slouches at all 32 stage envelopes LFO s with multiple shapes Absolutely wonderful Import Formats Reaktor has a mapping capability that allows you to import WAV or AIFF files and recently added Akai import into it s scheme Battery can load the same and Kontakt can do more Giga EXS HALion and soon Emu Comment Native Instruments has shown they are one up
94. t have effects attached to them Comments The Korg s are nice pieces of gear They sound great We hope that they would improve the architecture in the future better loading system less restrictive sample structure to really take advantage of their great internal voicing architecture Destination KURZWEIL History adapted from the official Kurzweil history Kurzweil has always been on the cutting edge of samplers and the K2000 K2500 and now the K2600 are extremely popular Kurzweil Music Systems Inc was founded by inventor Raymond Kurzweil who had developed a revolutionary reading machine for the blind that scans written materials and reads them aloud in a synthesized voice Musician Stevie Wonder a customer for the reading machine challenged Ray Kurzweil to create an electronic instrument that blended the richness of acoustic sound with the control and sound modification of electronics The Kurzweil engineers then developed the Page 48 Korg Trinity Triton Lastly on top of all that you can add a RAMKit structure inside a 1 SOUND This winds up being a Keymap on top of a Keymap A RAMKit points to various 1 SOUND files for each key This all said the ASR X is a powerful unit Currently it is being left for dead in the Emu product dept Too bad And it s only a beat box Import Formats The ASR X can import Akai S 1000 and Roland files from their proprietary disk formats It imports only their keymaps The ASR X also can
95. tem which supports reading and writing to DOS format FAT Import Formats An EOS Emu sampler can import Akai S 1000 series and S 3000 Programs and Roland Performances and Patches IN Ne Destination Ensoniq EPS ASR History and File Format The EPS was the successor to the famous or infamous and enormously popular Mirage It was 13 bit unfortunately it came out when 16 bit samplers were beginning to be introduced but was way ahead of it s time in terms of features and ease of use EPS means Ensoniq Perfor mance Sampler and to this day it is noted for that role Ensonig upgraded the design to full 16 bit and added digital effects in the 1990 released EPS 16 Plus and finished off the platform with the ASR 10 1992 adding SIMM memory up to 16mb and stereo sampling Page 45 Alternate Looping Modes since the outputs would be de emphasizing the high end without the data being emphasized first Conversely any Roland sound data you play through another medium will sound tinny since the frequency emphasis is not being filtered Translator s solution is to mimic the Roland input filters on the way in to the Roland and mimic the output filters on the way out by altering the wavedata using a high quality complex software digital filter Translator currently uses several effective algorithms to deal with this issue Authenthic this is the ACTUAL filter coded in the Roland itself You can t get more perfect than this
96. thers Interestingly SampleCell became a format in of itself providing the primary or strong secondary format for Alesis machines the Bitheadz Unity sampler and Creamware s Pulsar series Comments As of this writing digidesign is about to release SoftSampleCell Let s see where this goes Destination Bitheadz Unity DS 1 History and File Format Brainchild of Bitheadz this was the lone Mac software sampler for the longest time before the EXS 24 appeared and as of this writing is still the only stand alone Mac software sampler It also boasts incredible polyphony if you have the power 256 voices It is also dual platform Windows and Mac Bitheadz released Version 3 0 of Unity called Unity Session It provides disk streaming and import from Giga Good deal Unity DS 1 stored it s sounds on standard disk systems as uds files Session stores a slightly different format called uty They contain all the information and the samples Page 57 Basic Operation What s In A File What s In A File Translator also adds to the Explorer concept in another way With Windows Explorer you essentially have Directories also called Folders with Files in the Directories Think of ans ok Directories as Containers something that golds L E A TO FLUITE afe 1 something else Pn FLAT LAYER H a2 ALTON 12 ALTO 4 CA 15 H CJ ALTO 103 CS ALTO 1014 Now Translator adds another concept files can be container
97. tor for your own personal and professional use but YOU MAY NOT COPY OR DISTRIBUTE any version of Translator All rights reserved Unauthorized use duplication or distribution is prohibited by law Page 39 EPSDisk This reads and writes Ensoniq floppies The file is epsdisk exe and can be accessed from the floppy icon on the Toolbar Information on use can be found in the epsdisk txt file in the Application directory AkaiDisk This reads Akai floppies The file 1s akaidisk exe and can be accessed from the floppy icon on the Toolbar Information on use can be found in the Help file accessible from the program SDisk This reads Roland S 50 550 W30 S330 floppies The file is sdisk exe and can be accessed from the floppy icon on the Toolbar Information on use can be found in the sdisk txt file in the Application directory IMPORTANT NOTE SDisk seems to react better run in DOS only mode and not run within a shell in Windows If you have problems running this program try it outside of Windows EMX This reads Emax floppies The file is emx exe and is accessed from the floppy icon on the Toolbar Use info can be found in the emx txt file in the Application directory Page 24 Options Options This dialog is where you set your preferences for Translator Note currently the dialog looks a bit different call if you have any questions Gigatemeler Reaktor SampleCel Soundfont EX5 24 ACID Kursas lecycie Record Se
98. tor makes this possible with Single Sound Mapping Single sounds are defined in Translator as the following file types all stored on DOS disk wav offically called RIFF files most commonly used on PC s aif commmonly called AIFF files although the spec says not to do this for some reason used often on Mac s sf Korg Triton sample files snd Akai MPC sample files S Pulsar sample files actually Akai samples Single Sound Mapping works like this Right click on a DOS directory and select Convert all files in xxxx and then select your destination format for example let s say Gigasampler When parsing through the directory s remember you can choose whether to translate the sub directories within that directory as well see Options General Tab for more information Single Sound Mapping will take the Single Sounds and start mapping them usually into a single file with the Base Name you give it Below is the Single Sound Mapping Options dialog Gigasampler Reaktor SampleCell Soundfont ExS 24 ACID Kurzweil Recycle Recount Setup Prefered l Drives ongle sample Wap Akal Emu l Ensoniqg Roland Base Hame for Combined Instruments Files Combined Curent FileT ypes considered as Single Samples are way RIFF ait AIFF sf Korg Sample s Pulsar Sample snd MPC Sample Wave gt Multi Insts Files Lokey cz All gt Single Inst File B HIK c7 GM Mapping i Frompt i 2 Prompt
99. tor operates on many multiple layer object sample files You can use any professional or non professional sample editor to edit samples contained in these files with Translator You can do this by simply right clicking on a file object and selecting Edit Sample if it appears This will cause the Sample Editor of your choice to appear opening a temporary version of the sample you have selected You can choose the Sample Editor from with the Options dialog Setup tab You then can edit the sample to your hearts content then you can close the Sample Editor If you save the sample in an edited form Translator will automatically write the sample back in it s edited form If you do not save it Translator assumes that you canceled your operations and will not write anything back to the original file Translator does not lose any information originally in the source file using this technique Translator does one thing however that s a slight twist in order to accomodate your Sample Editor Many if not all Sample Editors are only able to playback samples at certain sample rates most commonly 44 1k 22 05k and others Many samples you ll export in this fashion may have different sample rates This can cause problems what if you have a 35 1k sample and you export it and you want to hear your Page 11 GigaSampler Studio p p Destination WAUME MADn TEOEAOLOGY IKT Giga Sampler Studio History and File Format The Ne
100. try of LA many film artists and commercial jingle writers use Rolands These Roland s used a proprietary disk format The DJ 70 phrase machine also used this format Recently Roland has resurrected the sampler or at least a unit that can read these samples The XV 5080 is a combination of the popular JV 2080 technology with the older S 7x engine It saves to a svd sdp and wav combination on the standard DOS format Architecture Description A Roland disk holds a variety of objects The Patch is the basic instrument unit A Patch is a KeyMap made up of different key ranges not overlapping called Partials A Partial can access up to 4 samples Samples are only mono and stereo samples are made up of two mono files Performances are a collection of up to 32 Patches which can be grouped or separated on any MIDI Channel A Volume is collection of one or more Performances Although the Roland can stores any of these objects separately in other words a Patch doesn t have to be in a Volume it is helpful to think of the organization as a hierarchy Most commer cial CD ROM s put everything in Volumes proper Peculiarities Interestingly the wavedata information sampled with a Roland S 7x series sampler is treated with a Frequency Emphasis boost which pumps up the high end When the Roland plays the sound out of it s outputs it s internal hardware filters compensate for the built in frequency emphasis making the sample sou
101. u drag a file over Translator will know that you want to translate to EXS 24 and won t show this dialog The Right Click Method The Right Click Method enables you to convert DOS files to another DOS file Simply select the file you wish to translate right click and select Convert The available options will show select the translation you would like Example Let s say you have a Akai S 5000 akp file and you want to convert to GigaStudio 1 Select the akp file in the LEFT PANE and right click on it 2 Click on Convert and select the Gigasampler Files gig option 3 The translation will begin The Translation will write the gig file s into the same directory as the akp file You can override this by checking the Show Common Dialog option in Options Page 5 Propellerheads Reason and Recycle Import Formats Bitheadz developed the Osmosis program which really serves as a importer for Unity but they sell it as a stand alone product as well which is nice for SampleCell Alesis and Pulsar owners Comments It s sort of amazing that Unity hasn t took off as much as it should Perhaps it s future is in the streaming capabilities Destination Propellerheads Reason and Recycle History and File Format Propellerheads makes good music software Recycle smashed into the scene around 1995 and now it is standard usage among most musicians Propellerheads latest with Recycle is 2 0 which supports stereo files and has
102. ual Drives an entire disk is 650mb With Akai there is the additional area to determine Partition Size again in mb This can be maximum 80mb Miscellaneous Topics Stereo Wave Support Translator encounters many situations where wavesamples in stereo mono or dual mono formats have the opportunity to be organized in a different way Translator attempts to retain the original format whenever possible except if it is more advanta geous to be organized in a different way in the destination format The other exception is if it has not been coded yet Dual mono is usually easier to initially implement Dual mono panned hard left and hard right is technically the same as stereo see below for the exceptions Most hardware samplers use dual mono configurations with the exception of Giga Emu and other software samplers that are able to use stereo wav or AIFF files Translator provides two options regarding how Stereo files are handled Combine to Stereo and Combine Unconditionally Combine to stereo when checked will take a pair of mono files and combine them into one Stereo sample if the destination format allows it Combine Unconditionally refers to the check Translator makes on a sample pair if Combine to Stereo is checked The check mainly focuses on loop points but can refer to sample rate tuning or other factors that would affect the samples and their difference in playback If Combine Unconditionally is checked Trans
103. unterpart file In this Akai case this would be an ak1 or a ak3 file DOS Counterpart files can be big for instance an EOS Bank can be up to 128mb This is prohibitive to send if you are using a regular 56K telephone modem in that case send a TestMode file see below Otherwise if you are equipped with DSL or Cable send us a DOS Counterpart file it is usually more helpful Making a DOS Counterpart file Simply drag the single file from the right to the left You will usually get this type of dialog i a Gigasampler Instrument emagic EXS 24 Instrument Reality PatchPatchwork Ensonig EPS445R Image ete etal Reaktor MAP File SoundF ort Akal 5 5000 Instrument Akal Image ak 1 ak3 MwA File AIFF File Cancel x a If not go to Options Preferred and make sure these are selected karepe hemes ge Instead of selecting your destination format select the appropriate counterpart file For instance in the above you would choose Akai i Image ak1 ak3 Your Akai file will then be saved as xxxx ak1 H ta I or ak3 in case of S 3000 Programs Zip that up using Winzip or other compresser and e mail that to us Page 33 Options Reaktor Tab Reaktor Options Tab Intel Motorola Reaktor is a cross platform Sampler synth If you are re intending to write map files for use in the Mac it can write them in a more Mac friendly way ACID Options Tab Setup Pretered

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