Ableton Forum

I have a bunch of older sample cds from various places and for various samplers ( emu, akai, ensomiq, kurzweil ect ) as i have owned tons of samplers in the past but now just use a mv8800 and live but was wondering how i would go about getting these instruments to read in sampler or on windows period. I bought translator roland edition for the mv but i cant even get all of them to translate to the mv format to use anyone else have solutions or know more about this stuff. Im a engineer first and could rewire a patchbay 7 ways or splice tape easier. thanks.

akai - you can read these right in live, iirc, for S1000/S3000 format (what most are). You can suck in the whole CD at once. It's not perfect but it works OK.

kurzweil - I think this is a pretty well documented format, try extreme sample converter or translator. I don't think anyone translates directly to live sampler, but you should be able to convert to exs24 or kontakt or gig, sampler can import any of those.

emu - good luck for some reason no one really converts emu samples properly. there is so many synthesis options with the z-plane filters and the cords that it's very possible it can't be reproduced in sampler anyways, so maybe that is why no one tries. you'd think most patches would work though? if you have an ultra, you might have a chance, especially if you have a drive that is fat32 - extreme sample converter can (AFAIK, never tried it) read E4B. But if it's an EIII CDROM, then you'd have to load it into the E4, save it off (when it will become an E4B instead of an EIII bank), read it from the PC (or copy it to a scsi drive in FAT format, which you then move over to your PC), and convert it. If you can get into E4B, you can also play it directly in the free Proteus VX software.

Of course, if you really mean you just want it in software instead of hardware (or have a lot of CDROMs you just want access to)... apparently the full version of Kontakt 4 can import the CDs directly. Even the EMU ones. I don't have Kontakt (yet) so can't verify how well it works.. i'd imagine except for emu patches with lots of cords and weird filters, it shouldn't be too bad. Of course, Kontakt is not cheap, and also it comes with such a huge library, if you get it, you may decide you don't need to import all those CDs after all

Thanks for that i just got off the phone with chicken systems and he was telling me the same issuses with emu translations. ( i understand as i owned a emax and a command station ) so i see where trying to play the patches in anything else would not be a fair translation. I am going to look into kontakt as i am just trying to simplify my life i sold a rack of samplers ( kurzweil k2000rs, yamaha a4000, akai s2000 ect ) and now want to keep things simple and straight between live and my mv8800.

I just have about 10 years of samples and products i dont want to toss out bc i cant use them so we will see. Maybe i will post some patches for sampler here from them if i ever get them converted, is there a place to put these?

i don't know what you use your mv8800 for, guessing it's like the mv8000/rs7000/mpc type drum box?
but if you're already heavy into live... you might consider replacing it with kontakt + maschine, together they might even be a little cheaper new (so you might be able to do the replacement for basically free, or very cheap) maschine is (mostly) a hardware controller that should do everything your mv8800 does. but it would also integrate very well into live, so if you're mostly in the box, it would actually be a lot more powerful in the end.

unless you're really attached to the roland sound, or the roland effects, of course... i do like some of their effects boxes...

Im attached to being away from the laptop at times. Theres nothing like just having a turntable and sampler and beating some pads. I have always owned a sampler and am a hardware guy but love my ableton. I am not so much attached to the mv as just the way of working. I appreciate all the advice and after talking to chicken systems think i might go with kontakt and translator kontakt edition as well. Thanks all have a happy easter.

perfectly understandable. so, if you already have translator roland edition, i don't think you need the kontakt edition - kontakt itself can handle importing everything. and once you get it into kontakt format, translator should be able to translate that to mv8800 format. even the free kontakt player can handle some imports itself, though not from CDROM afaik.

but you're going to love what I just discovered... in fact, this may be of interest to a LOT of people. though it is not quite as helpful as it could be, it's VERY cool. Even the free Kontakt Player can actually import and convert from Emu to Kontakt format! And then, once it is in Kontakt format, you can import it directly into Sampler. I just did this, and it works. It wasn't exactly perfect but it sounded pretty good! Volume was a little loud, had to turn down the channel gain slightly to keep it from overloading, but it really sounds good. Sampler itself will import from Akai so I never tried it with KP, but I do have one roland CD (solo strings) and I am importing it now. I expect that it would work with kurzweil as well. You should give it a try.

As far as the pain... kontakt will batch-convert from CD, but in sampler, you have to import each kontakt instrument manually. Usually you don't need them all though - for example, in the emu patch I converted (solo trombones off the orchestral vol. 3 library) I got about 26 kontakt instruments. 2 of them were the actual raw trombones; others were things like 'mf trombone fifths', 'trombone section', 'mf flanged trombone', i.e. essentially the same instrument but with extra effects or layering, which I don't find all that useful usually.

good info and i usually like to import 1 at a time so i know what i have as well!!!

so i tried roland as well (just had it batch converting, so had to wait a while... kontakt crashed live after 1/2 hour or so, I think this is because kontakt only runs in demo mode after doing kontakt 4 'stuff' and maybe it timed out? it takes a long time to import from CDs) but found that the roland samples import better than I expected (they have that weird hi-end pre-emphasis thing... it doesn't sound bad though, so they may be adjusting for it), but the envelopes did not import correctly at all, defaulted to 0 decay, sustain at -inf db. Quick fix and you get to hear them. So really not bad all around!

for roland sounds you have to always turn off pre emphasis just basic rule of thumb there.

the pre-emphasis is already in the samples... but I think that kontakt auto-de-emphasizes it or something.

well, so far it works OK, but I have gotten a few crashes while importing emu and roland samples. Kontakt Player will crash and take live down with it. So it's not perfect. But I've gotten a lot imported too.

in case anyone cares, i've imported almost 6 CDs now. i had a few patches with kontakt couldn't read, but mostly fine. when it can't read them, it crashes live.

more importantly... the sampler import from kontakt isn't really all that great, but might be helpful. If you preview a patch in kontakt, and then the converted sampler instrument, they are a lot different. I just tried one, 'modern orchestra' from emu producer collection 1. When pulled into sampler, you lose the envelopes, while they are normal in the original kontakt patch played through kontakt. the kontakt patch also appears to have effects on it, which I can't figure out where they are coming from (weren't in insert FX, weren't in send fx)? If I add reverb and fix the envelope, they are really close though.

Which means if you don't like the effects in the original patch... moving them to sampler will remove them for you. But if you want them, you still need kontakt. Also for envelopes... any envelope features (slow build, etc) will not pass on to sampler.

that is odd but i bought translator and one of the options is trranslate with fx 1,2, and 3 on them or off. I have been doing the ensoniq patches first as they are my favorite cds.