Ableton Forum

I'm helping a live ensemble reboot an old Glenn Branca composition. Originally the piece was played on several Kurzweil 2500 keyboards, but I'm trying to create a Live set with all the original samples so they don't have to rent heavy/expensive keyboards all the time.

The original files the group has available involve .k25 files, which appear to be sample libraries meant for loading onto the K2500. Is there a plugin for Live – or another piece of software all together – which can read .k25 files digitally? I really only need to get to the samples so I can make an instrument rack with them.

Can anyone help point me in the right direction?

Hmm, I've never heard of one myself, my wife used to have a K2600 for a time. I'd try asking on Gearlsutz or the /synthesizers sub on reddit.com.

Chicken Translator might help you. It says it supports .k25 files. You could load up the samples then save them as pretty much any file format you want. I've used it to build banks for my Emu sampler.

http://www.chickensys.com/products2/tra ... rmats.html

cskracer wrote:Chicken Translator might help you. It says it supports .k25 files. You could load up the samples then save them as pretty much any file format you want. I've used it to build banks for my Emu sampler.

http://www.chickensys.com/products2/tra ... rmats.html

I get nothing but

"Supported Formats

This applies to Mac and Windows versions starting with Version 6.0, Build 3. For a list pertaining to the older deprecated Mac version 1.5, Build 64 (usually for OS9 purposes), email us at [email protected]."

on that address. Can you tell if Chickensys implemented Sampler support? They told me years ago they were almost there.

Weird.

Yes it has Sampler listed in source and destination. I'll have a look in the app for you tomorrow night when I have a chance to get on my machine.

cskracer wrote:Weird.

Yes it has Sampler listed in source and destination. I'll have a look in the app for you tomorrow night when I have a chance to get on my machine.

i'd appreciate this. chicken sys came up in my scouting and if i can confirm it will read .k25 samples it would be worth a purchase.

OK I created a k25 file from a wav and then converted it back into a NI .nki file and I can play it via Komplete Kontrol in Live.

I ran into what looks to be a bug when attempting to convert from any format directly into a Simpler/Sampler file format. I've logged the bug as it looks to be a trivial error - trying to use a temporary file that Translator already already has marked as being open. They say they respond within 24hrs generally so we'll see.

slashsound wrote:I'm helping a live ensemble reboot an old Glenn Branca composition. Originally the piece was played on several Kurzweil 2500 keyboards, but I'm trying to create a Live set with all the original samples so they don't have to rent heavy/expensive keyboards all the time.

The original files the group has available involve .k25 files, which appear to be sample libraries meant for loading onto the K2500. Is there a plugin for Live – or another piece of software all together – which can read .k25 files digitally? I really only need to get to the samples so I can make an instrument rack with them.

Can anyone help point me in the right direction?

.k25 files are proprietary Kurzweil files specific to the K2500 synth.... later synths (K2600 series) used k26 format.... Live won't be able to extract any info from these files as it contains specific synth parameter data (like layers, velocity, key mapping etc) as well as the actual sample.

The best (only?) way to extract sample data from this file is to convert it to a WAV file and then import the WAV into Live.... Chicken Systems make a program called Translator (currently version 6) which converts a wide section of formats into other formats:
http://www.chickensys.com/products2/translator/

It's very easy to use and not really that expensive.... you can even get a slimmed down version of Translator specific for a certain type of sampler eg. Akai, Kurzweil etc.... these sampler-specific versions are even cheaper.

I've used it for my even older K2000 synth (translate .krz files to WAV) and it worked great... it's fiddly but it works.... good luck!