Re: [LAU] Strange aiff files

Thanks Brent,

Its the ocassional email like this that makes it all worth while.

Cheers,
Erik

Brent Busby wrote:

> This thread has been very helpful for me too. Several years ago, I
> sampled an entire drumset fairly exhaustively at multiple volumes, mic
> distances, etc. with an Akai MPC2000 and a pair of Earthworks condenser
> mics. I use the sample set a lot now that I'm living in an apartment,
> partially because it's really nice, and partially because the set that
> was sampled was the one I used in my band twenty years ago, so it's
> fairly nostalgic that I "virtually" still have my drums. (And partially
> because I'd probably be evicted if I tried to bring a drumset in
> there...) Actually it's fairly eerie to listen to in headphones with no
> EQ or effects -- if you sequence things a human drummer would do, which
> I can do because I'm a drummer, you'd swear it was that drumset.
>
> The MPC2000 saves its samples in its quirky SND format that I haven't
> had anything handy to translate into other formats up until now, so I've
> always worried about dependence on the Akai hardware samplers. They're
> still popular now, but I've seen plenty of gear become obscure that used
> to be common. Even worse, the Akai filesystem is a bizarre mutation of
> DOS/FAT that gets long filename capability from a kludge completely
> incompatible with the one Microsoft ended up using in Windows 95 and
> later. The files look like FILENAM~.EXT when mounted as FAT, and you
> have no way of finding out what the real names were on the Akai from
> looking at the directories in Windows or in Linux.
>
> Today, this thread about sndfile-info made me try (on a lark) running
> sndfile-info on one of my Akai SND files, and it floored me -- it knew
> everything about the sample. It saw the original Akai filename embedded
> in the file. It even knew specifically that it came from an Akai
> MPC2000. I tried converting it to a standard WAV with sndfile-convert,
> and that worked too.
>
> Later, after looking at the libsndfile web site, I did see that MPC2000
> compatibility was added earlier this year, but I didn't expect that when
> I tried it, so it did surprise me. Usually, when something says it has
> Akai support, they mean S1000 rack sampler format. This is very useful.
>
> --
> + Brent A. Busby + "We've all heard that a million monkeys
> + UNIX Systems Admin + banging on a million typewriters will
> + University of Chicago + eventually reproduce the entire works of
> + Physical Sciences Div. + Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet,
> + James Franck Institute + we know this is not true." -Robert Wilensky

-- 
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Erik de Castro Lopo
http://www.mega-nerd.com/
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