Akai S950 back ups.

Hi
I just started my S950 up and realized that I have all these old floppy's with dusty drums on em. I'd like to store them to my laptop. Make a lil S950 drum library if you feel me, cause I'm also a DAW guy.

Now for the question. Can I just use a USB floppy reader and plug it in my Mac and drag the 12bit wav's out or is it more complicated than that, I could always just track out the samples into logic with a mixer but the quality of my mic pre's are questionable. I don't want to loose that vintage S series sound,

Hit me back with knowledge please.
Peace

To be honest part of the sound is in the inputs and out stage.But yes i be wondering about importing also.??

unfortunatly you can't use a usb floppy drive to do this, they only work with dos formatted floppies.

if you have a pc with a real floppy drive you can back up your floppies with it but you will need a special program.

for linux http://wiw.org/~meta/s2k.php

for older dos/windows (95,98)http://mda.smartelectronix.com/akai/

on more recent windows (xp) you may also be able to use omniflop http://www.shlock.co.uk/Utils/OmniFlop/OmniFlop.htm
onmiflop will let you copy disks to disk images. but you can't get the audio files out of the images with it. this is how you copy disks to use with a floppy emulator.

unfortunatly nothing i know works on a mac, modern macs have no floppy controller, and older mac have strange floppy drives that nobody ever managed to write an akai disk driver for.

like the other guys said,if you want to use these sounds in your DAW you should just record them, if you import the files from the floppies they won't sound like an s950.

motosega wrote:
on more recent windows (xp) you may also be able to use omniflop http://www.shlock.co.uk/Utils/OmniFlop/OmniFlop.htm

Thats the way to go

motosega wrote:onmiflop will let you copy disks to disk images. but you can't get the audio files out of the images with it. this is how you copy disks to use with a floppy emulator.

Yes and no. Omniflop is unable get the audio out of the floppy images it creates, but you can get the audio out (the 'dirty way' so to say). Just download the ModPlugtracker (openMPT) create a new OpenMPT module (module is the term for "song" in tracker software ). go to the sampletab and import the image file (you can simply use drag and drop from the windows explorer). Most audio editors or DAWs would now show the message "Cannot load. No Audio File". But ModPlug tracker don't give a ish It just ask you how to interpret this file. So choose 16bit signed mono and your floppyimage will load into a single sample. Since it is an imagefile there is nonaudio data also and you shouldn't listen to this at high volume before you choped the samples . Your speaker (and your ear) wont like this nonaudio shit

motosega wrote:like the other guys said,if you want to use these sounds in your DAW you should just record them, if you import the files from the floppies they won't sound like an s950.

They do sound very different. Not like the 950 but different (depending how it was sampled on the 950 before (faster, HiGain etc) they can sound much dirtier than directly from the 950.
But I second you. Recording the output of the 950 is often much faster and easier or to even go a step further, I always prefer to use the 950 directly as the soundsource that is controlled via MIDI instead cause 'THE SOUND' is more than simply audio in -> audio out.

peace

motosega wrote:unfortunatly you can't use a usb floppy drive to do this, they only work with dos formatted floppies.

if you have a pc with a real floppy drive you can back up your floppies with it but you will need a special program.

for linux http://wiw.org/~meta/s2k.php

for older dos/windows (95,98)http://mda.smartelectronix.com/akai/

on more recent windows (xp) you may also be able to use omniflop http://www.shlock.co.uk/Utils/OmniFlop/OmniFlop.htm
onmiflop will let you copy disks to disk images. but you can't get the audio files out of the images with it. this is how you copy disks to use with a floppy emulator.

unfortunatly nothing i know works on a mac, modern macs have no floppy controller, and older mac have strange floppy drives that nobody ever managed to write an akai disk driver for.

like the other guys said,if you want to use these sounds in your DAW you should just record them, if you import the files from the floppies they won't sound like an s950.

Okay Amen to that, Thanks for the helpful info, even if its bad news for mac/S950 users. There aint much chance of me ever going windows lol. I'll just keep tracking through the mixer for now, to be honest I actually dont mind doing that. Ima try use it to its true potential, its the one piece of gear I just don't want to sell. Peace

dryad-66 wrote:To be honest part of the sound is in the inputs and out stage.But yes i be wondering about importing also.??

Yeah thats true about the ins and outs. It's great to have limitations on this machine to expand our creativity too. I know people have said it before but the filters on this machine are heavy Weight. Im still going to be banging stuff out of it 40 years if I make it that far!!!