Re: [Linuxsampler-devel] AKAI samplelibrary loader is online

[Josh G. <jg...@us...>]

On Tue, 2003-03-25 at 14:51, Christian Schoenebeck wrote:
> On Tue, 25 Mar 2003 12:20:37 +0100
> Benno Senoner <be...@ga...> wrote:
> 
> > Hi, I'm forwarding a mail from Sebastien, he has put online
> > his AKAI samplelibrary loader which will be useful for AKAI import
> > in LinuxSampler. 
> 

Okay, I just had a look at the code for libakai. The following are some
of my thoughts and findings concerning the Akai formats, libakai and
libInstPatch. I would like to invite Sebastien to correct me and perhaps
clairify what the scope of libakai is. It would be really nice to
collaborate on this stuff :)

It seems like libakai is currently based on the S1000 format. I just
realized by looking at the document at:
http://www.abel.co.uk/~maxim/akai/akaiinfo.htm which the libakai library
appears to have used as a reference (from the look of the comments) that
the S3000 sample format appears to be identical to the S1000 format (I
don't believe the program data is the same though). That makes things a
little easier when thinking of supporting multiple akai formats. The
later formats appear to use WAVE files which should also ease things.

> 
> > AKAI S1000/2000 does not use files  but reads the samples directly
> > from CD. Alternatively one can dump the CD's image to a file 
> > (cat /dev/cdrom >file.img :-) ) and then work on that image.
> 
> Actually it has files, though very primitive and Akai uses *of course*
> it's own file system. As some Akai CDs do also contain demo audio
> tracks, I was thinking about extracting only the first track instead of
> reading the whole CD image.
> 

Are you sure Akai patches are distributed as files? I'd like to find
this out, because I'm thinking that filesystem and lowlevel device
access code really does not belong in libInstPatch. It seems somewhat
like a portability nightmare and I wan't to try and keep libInstPatch as
portable as possible.

The way I'd like to see things, is that an external utility is used to
rip the instruments off of different medias and convert them to files
that can then be imported using libInstPatch. Can one find Akai patches
on the internet for example? What format would they most likely be in?

> > Anyway being CD image based, it is not easy to write 
> > manipulated data to HD (one would need to create a whole image) but I
> 
> As Akai tracks also consist of files, I think that should not be a
> problem. So I think manipulation of Akai patches, writing to HD,
> creating Akai ISOs and burning them back on CDs should be possible.
> 
> I'm just curious if he solved the Teledisk problem. As some Akai
> libraries seem to use this odd "Teledisk" format and I was not able to
> find any information about it.
> 

Looking at some of the disk access code, libakai appears to support only
MAC OS X and win32 systems currently. The code doesn't seem that complex
though, so I'm sure it could be easily ported to Linux.

What revisions of the Akai formats are most desirable to support? Here
is what I currently have:

S900/S950
S1000
S3000
MPC-2000
S5000/S6000

From what I have heard on this list S1000 is the most popular?

I think it would be wisest to implement Akai support directly in
libInstPatch for cleanliness and to reduce dependencies. I think the
libakai source as well as the akaiinfo web page will prove quite useful
in doing this. It would be nice to collaborate with the libakai author,
Sebastien, and perhaps see about getting libInstPatch to use the files
ripped from a libakai based ripper utility.

> CU
> 

Cheers.
	Josh Green