EXS 24 Logic Sampler Users Group

* Reading S1000 floppies (indirectly)

If you are trying to tempt long-term Akai users to migrate to ESX, 
then lots of those guys will have personal libraries that they want 
to use, which can't easily be transferred to CDROM for import into 
ESX24. 

The guys I know with S1000/2000/etc series machines have walls 
stacked with floppies! (the guys who have their libraries on hard 
drive still tend to have the floppies as backups).

So, the "reads S1000 disks" EXS feature becomes a heck of a lot more 
appealing if that means "reads your existing patches off floppy". The 
S1000 floppy format is just a cut-down version of the HD/CDROM volume 
format, so changing the routines slightly so that they also cope with 
info off floppy ought to be a doddle.

The one problem might be that PC diskdrives are a bit variable, and 
you might not want an ESX function that isn't guaranteed to work 
every time on every machine (or you might not want the ESX to be 
doing odd low-level disk stuff at all) ... I'd suggest that the way 
around this is to forget about ESX trying to access the floppy drive 
directly and to just let the program read the floppydisk image files 
that are created by various freeware apps.

User uses freeware to convert the S1000 floppy to an image file on 
their harddrive, then EXS imports the contents of the image file. 
Sorted! 

Next question: reading S900 floppies, too? Maybe not such an 
atractive option, dunno.

=Erk=