A way to get audio from/to the s950 via floppy

Since the s950 has a comlete different floppy format its, floppys are not readable with the PC untill omniflop supported this format.
But even then you were only able to create a diskimage out of it. Good to backup all your floppy disks in case of a disk-error. But thats all right?

No, its not I just found out that it is posible to read out the audio of the image file and also overwrite the image file with new audio in it.
I dont know if this would have any benefit vs sampling the audio via the 950 input. It is also not as simple as sampling cause it has more steps to do.
I'm not really finished with testing/research but it worked so far

if you are interested to hear more on how it works or have any ideas how this could be used expedient let me know.

peace

props peter, that is an awesome accomplishment.

i imagine its just a matter of reading the raw floppy image, skipping past the header, and finding the waveform data?

wrap it up in a nice little ui and you got yerself an app

that can be said for any of the formats, I coded a tool years ago years that can read any file without a format check.... choose your codec, stick in the offset....handy tool to help reversing container/audio formats, if you find it useful I'll send it to you.

Yes its just like that. I tried that beffore with Adobe Audition but I coudn't work it out so I forgot about it. Yesterday I've read a thread on the modplug tracker forum (really like this program and since a few days it support FLAC ! )

http://forum.openmpt.org/index.php?topic=4909.0

OpenMPT doesn't "recognize" anything, the truth is just that it doesn't give a single **** what data it reads. OpenMPT interprets all data as Pulse Code Modulation (PCM), and that's all the magic behind it. If you import an "unsigned" sample, you get the lowest values in the waveform if the byte value is low (like a space character), and the highest values if the byte value is high (like umlauts). The ASCII character "z" is close to the middle line in that case. "Signed" samples interpret the data a little different, as a signed 2-complement integer. In that case, the upper half of the sample data is mirrored, to put it in easy terms.

I thought: Lets give it a try, and loaded an s950 floppy image.
It worked. Of course, between the samples is other code that will make your ears bleed who cares about this junk? erase it.

Then I thought about what happen if I paste other audio into this file and save it.

Tried a few things cause when you save it it has the WAV header of course.

So the process to get the audio to the s950 is this

1. format a s950 floppy with the 950 and create a long sample of silence (gain all the way down, something like 20 seconds). Name it whatever you like and save this sample to the floppy.

2. create an image of this floppy on PC with omniflop (Akai s-series HD-disk 1600kB. near the end of the list)

3. open this image with a software that can load raw pcm or don't care what the format is and interpret anything as pcm. In openModPlug you'll need to set the format to 16bit signed mono. BTW I've managed it with Audition by now (rename the image extension from AKAI to raw and load it as raw

4. paste the audio you wanna transfer into the silence part of the image file and save it

5. open a text editor and remove the header and save it

6. extension back to AKAI

7. transfer image to floppy with omniflop

8. load the sample with the 950



I don't know if I will use this tho. Dont really see a reason for now.



This might work with other formats too that can be saved as imagefile. I will try it with some old roland W30 floppys tomorrow.


peace

You should try out more modern formats, like the ones used by the rs7000.. hint.

I started reversing these, so I could extract the wavs out of the files I transferred to my pc....as I sold the rs a while ago.....
Anyway formats like that are easier, the whole floppy images stuff is a headache, also the newer akai formats are cool.

I messed with the mpc2k formats a while ago, very simple, to pull the pcm data out you just have to change how theyre interleaved in the case of stereo files as far as I remember...
Then stick a wav header onto them after reading a few values into a stuct.... done...

Anyway if you need any help get in touch.... I used to specialize in this kind of coding.
You should do a tool like chickensys!, but simpler....which doesnt crash

Wal Martian wrote:You guys know about s900dump the .wav via midi application right? Seems like alot less steps than all this disk stuff.

Sure. Less steps but it takes forever via MIDI. For one sample thats ok but try to MIDI dump a whole disk

peace

szr wrote:You should do a tool like chickensys!, but simpler....which doesnt crash

+1

'Awave Studio' reads .AKAI images created from S950 floppies with Omniflop.
All your samples are there with their individual sample rates and loop points in tact.
It's $99 though.

To write to the S950 - save your programs from Awave Studio in S1000 format, rename them .AKS and .AKP then http://users.skynet.be/emxp/ can be used to create an Akai S1000 floppy disk which can be read in the S950.

I sample into the S950 instead though, but I have tested the above and it works fine.
Of course, this all hangs on that $99 price tag.

I'll be using Omniflop to archive my S950 floppies. It'd be a shame to lose some of my work and effort.