Forum for all other samplers & synths such as Maschine, MVs, Akai S & Z series, Roland, Korg, OP-1, analog synths etc.
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By motosega Sat Oct 10, 2015 10:39 pm
fed up with running windows98 on an old computer just so you can load stuff into your sampler?
having trouble finding a floppy disk that will format without bad sectors?
Still waiting for that sample to transfer with midi sample dump?

at last, akaitools is here!! (actual its been around for ages)
but you probably haven’t heard of it because its a command-line program for Linux.
learning how to use Linux is beyond the scope of this article so i'll assume you kind of know what you are doing with Linux in general.
******this might work on a mac too but i can't help you because i don't have one******

what akaitools does is let you work with akai S3000 hard disks in Linux.
you can format drives in S3000 format.
read samples from S1000 and S3000 format drives.
convert files to akai S3000 format.
copy files to akai drives.
etc.

it also does some stuff with ensoniq eps files.

it is compatible with Akai S-series samplers (S1000/S1100/S2800/S3000/S3200/CD3000/S2000/S3000XL/S3200XL)

if you have an S1000 then you MUST get OS4.40 before you do this.otherwise you won't be able to read the S3K Sample files. S1100 needs the latest OS too.
you can get OS floppies on eBay or you can splash out and get O.S. Eproms(if you don't have a hard disk this is really handy) if you have an old PC you can download the O.S. from the internet and make your own floppies.


you need:

a SCSI zip drive for your sampler. i have a zip100

a USB zip drive for your Linux computer. i have a Zip 250.

akaitools by Hiroyuki Ohsaki
http://www.lsnl.jp/~ohsaki/software/aka ... index.html

follow the installation instructions on the link above(the instructions take it for granted that you have downloaded the archive, decompressed in and are now in your terminal emulator in the directory where you downloaded it.)



first, get your SCSI zip drive working with your sampler.
this may be easier said than done.
my S1000hd had internal terminating resistors installed that i had to remove before the external SCSI port would work. i have no idea if other models are like this too.

the last SCSI device in the chain must ALWAYS have a terminator, luckily the zip drive has a built in terminator activated by a switch on the back.
SCSI devices have an I.D. number from 1-7 , which MUST BE DIFFERENT for each device on the chain.
the zip drive can either be i.d. 5 or 6.
my S1000's internal hard disk is i.d. 5 and to change it i'd have to open it up and change some jumpers on the hard disk.
the S1000 itself is by default i.d. 6 so i changed it to 7 and saved the O.S. to the hard disk so every time it boots up it switches to SCSI id 7.
i also have a SCSI cdrom drive on i.d. 4

if it still dosen't work read this: http://akaiscsifaq.digidude.net/

got you sampler working? ok. now the fun starts (did i say fun?, maybe i meant to say "hair pulling")

first a warning: IF YOU JUST COPY AND PASTE WITHOUT UNDERSTANDING YOU WILL DO BAD THINGS TO YOUR COMPUTER.


in this guide commands you must type at the terminal are written like this

>ls

i assume you have akaitools installed at this point. and that you are in the terminal

plug in your usb zip drive, then run the command:

>dmesg

you should see something like this:

[ 5051.394167] usb 1-1: new full-speed USB device number 6 using uhci_hcd
[ 5051.539194] usb 1-1: New USB device found, idVendor=059b, idProduct=0032
[ 5051.539209] usb 1-1: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=5
[ 5051.539220] usb 1-1: Product: USB Zip 250
[ 5051.539233] usb 1-1: Manufacturer: Iomega
[ 5051.539239] usb 1-1: SerialNumber: 8032412908911313
[ 5051.546272] usb-storage 1-1:1.0: USB Mass Storage device detected
[ 5051.546420] SCSI10 : usb-storage 1-1:1.0
[ 5052.553258] SCSI 10:0:0:0: Direct-Access IOMEGA ZIP 250 61.T PQ: 0 ANSI: 0 CCS
[ 5052.573228] sd 10:0:0:0: [sdc] Spinning up disk...


the last line is the important bit. sdc is the device name of my drive. this may be different each time you plug your drive in so check with dmesg EVERY time you run akaiformat.
BE VERY CAREFUL THAT YOU DON’T GET THIS WRONG OTHERWISE YOU WILL FORMAT THE WRONG DISK!!!!!! don't say i never warned you.

today my usb zip drive is sdc tomorrow it could be sdb or sdd of sdf

UNIX as you may know, references everything as a file
files that correspond to devices are kept in the folder /dev/
so the device file of my zip drive is /dev/sdc

you can tell akaitools which disk to use either by invoking it with the flag -f /dev/sdc each time you run a tool OR by setting the environment variable AKAI_DISK like so:

>AKAI_DISK=/dev/sdc
>export AKAI_DISK

replace sdc with your device.

akai discs must be formatted in a special way.
each disc must be divided into partitions which Must be 60MB or smaller each.

to format a zip into two 50MB partitions do:

>akaiformat 50 50

or five 20MB partitions
>akaiformat 20 20 20 20 20

when you press enter after a short time it will ask if you are sure:

akaiformat: format '/dev/sdc'?

check your device file is correct and type y

your zip drive will briefly(or not so briefly) make a few noises then its done!

partitions are divided into VOLUMES which are really just folders.
you can create volumes with the akaimkdir command.

create a volume called chops in the first partition
>akaimkdir -p1 /chops

create a volume called basses in the second partition
>akaimkdir -p2 /basses


now you want to copy some files into the zip disk.

first you want to convert them to akai s3000 format with wav2akai:

>cd my_folder_of_wavs
>for i in *.wav; do wav2akai -v -n $(basename "${i}") "${i}"; done

my_folder_of_wavs is the folder where you have your wav files.
the next funky command converts every wav file in the current folder into an .a3s akai format sample. stereo files will be converted to a left and right pair.

then copy them to the drive
> for i in *.a3s; do akaiwrite -d /breaks/ "${i}"; done

this will copy all the a3s files in the current directory to the volume /breaks creating the volume /breaks if it dosent already exist.

when your files finnish copying you can just eject the disk and stick it in your sampler!


have fun!
By wrrkkksstffrrg Tue Aug 08, 2017 9:20 am
Very handy instruction set - I have used Akaitools a few times - great tool

Just trying to run it on Lubuntu 15.04 now and for some reason it cannot find the ZIp drive. I have popped a question on Stack Overflow about this, but if anyone here has encountered this, or found a solution, that would be great...

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/45548825/perl-script-akaitools-accessing-usb-iomega-zip-drive-on-ubuntu-linux
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By motosega Tue Aug 08, 2017 7:10 pm
you can tell akaitools which disk to use either by invoking it with the flag -f /dev/sdc each time you run a tool OR by setting the environment variable AKAI_DISK like so:

>AKAI_DISK=/dev/sdc
>export AKAI_DISK

but instead you can do:
>ln /dev/mo /dev/sdc

and then you won't need to set the environment variable because akaitools defaults to /dev/mo
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By diarrhea3 Wed Jan 31, 2018 2:27 am
Ran into an issue maybe one of you can help me with. I am using a USB ZIP drive and a laptop running Lubuntu with Perl5 and akaitools installed.

I have verified the zip drive device name is sdb with dmesg and run the following commands

>AKAI_DISK=/dev/sdb
>export AKAI_DISK

When I attempt to format a disk I get the following output:

>sudo akaiformat 50 50
akaiformat: format '/dev/mo'?

Why is it attempting to format "mo" instead of "sdb"?
User avatar
By motosega Wed Jun 27, 2018 4:35 pm
just create format a regualr file instead of a block device.

make a zero filled file with dd, format with akaitools, add the wave files you want, then burn it to a cd when your done

i've tried this and it works fine.

i sold my S1000 a while back, but i recently bought an S3000xl so i'm back in the game...