I just bought the Akai S2000 sampler, which is actually my first hardware sampler.
It has maxed memory of 32MB, but everything else is stock, meaning no floppy emulator either.
I've looked for listings on Ebay and found them going for around a 100$ ?
That is, unless instead of searching for "floppy emulator akai s2000" I just write "floppy emulator" and get much cheaper listings that look identical to the ones advertised for the Akai S series.
My question - what kind of specific floppy emulator I should look for? Is there any difference?

 

https://hxc2001.com/store/index.html
https://www.aliexpress.com/wholesale?catId=0&initiative_id=SB_20191023064535&SearchText=Gotek
https://www.alibaba.com/trade/search?fsb=y&IndexArea=product_en&CatId=&SearchText=Gotek

 

Last edited: Oct 23, 2019

dont buy usb emulator....
you want buy scsi2sd its like hdd then..

you can have nightmares with that usb emu when not configure exactly like you need it...need flashtool then in some cases..
and its not worth it better buyscsi2sd for 100-120 and you haveca little hdd instead off 3643 floppy disks on usb stick

the cheapest usb emu with old display not oled are going for 20-30 on ebay

 

you are right , about nightmares but if he have little skill he can do it but still it was a nightmares but cost him 20$
if he like to buying sd which best solution then he can buy it for 89$ including shipping
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/400...chweb0_0,searchweb201602_8,searchweb201603_55

 

yep...bout nightmare: like when you have to wait another 2 weeks on flash tool or something..but its s2000 is an xl so he can find one i think...runnin from day one easy
..this one is right for s2000 but overpriced..
https://www.ebay.de/itm/Floppy-Disk...767461?hash=item261a865125:g:RwEAAOSwSTpbvhhy

but scsi2sd is way better...

 

What kind of nightmares? I'm looking for the cheapest option that is faster than floppys, but I also have no idea how to set anything up... I picked the sampler up for 80 euros, so I'm unwilling to spend more for upgrades than I paid for the sampler itself, at least for the time being, since I'm on a tight budget.
What about SCSI1 HD ?

 

Last edited: Oct 23, 2019

You want emulate floppy right? that means it's floppy speed and size too. Gotek is fine for non-scsi samplers, but one like s-2000 definitely go for SCSI2SD, much faster and you can save larger banks

Cheapest option (Gotek) means you need to flash HxC firmware into it to make it work with samplers, nightmare.. little extra work for sure

 

Last edited: Oct 23, 2019

I would go with the SCSI2SD but it's too expensive.. What about an older external hard drive that would work with the SCSI connection on the back?

 

zip100mb is fine, older SCSI hard drives are noisy and unreliable

 

Last edited: Oct 23, 2019

Any good ones that would go up to 500MB ?

 

Lotharek praktically 'invented' those:
https://lotharek.pl/
I would recommend getting it from him, that guy has a tremendous expertise on floppy emulation. While I miss my Akai S2800 (should'venever sold that), I have one of his floppy emus for my fellow c64 and one for my amiga 500.
they work like a charm.

 

then brother take and buy it for 100$ ready with SD card and the firmware installed
and forgot about all the problems
send to him an email he will give you the best answer ask him a video how to assemble he will give you everything what you need including
pdf how to install it , just speak with him !
best advise you will not find then this guy https://lotharek.pl/

 

Goddamn, speaking of "things you never should have sold", you have an Amiga 500?!? Please tell me you're using Music-X and/or Bars and Pipes Professional (either of which ranks with me as the best computer MIDI sequencers ever made). I actually upgraded from the former to the latter back in '91 or '92, back when I still had my own Amiga 500. I also had a "massive" 40 MB hard drive that snapped on to the expansion port on the side.

 

Plendix & Smoker thanks for the link, I'll keep this option in mind for when I have that kind of money to spend... Right now I'm simply looking for the cheapest upgrade option possible...

 

Now that's a long story... First things first. If you're into 'classic homecomputer sequencing': Have a look at Lothareks MiST. It's an FPGA with Midi I/O. Basically, an FPGA is a programmable chip. So this thing IS an Amiga, a c64, an Atari ST.. (and a NES, a SNES) NOT by emulating a machine, but by being that machine down to the transistors of it's (whatever) costum chips. You load a core from a menu and sit in front of an Atari ST, capable of loading Cubase and start sequencing. Here some guy is running Deluxe Music on the Amiga Core:

I would recommend doing it via some FPGA, over the original Hardware.
Original Hardware is fancy for gaming on crt screens, having same look and feel...
but for making music, one doesn't want 50hz crt look and feel.
Bars and Pipes.. yeah, I tried to get along with that, but I was very young, first year a teenager... I just didn't understand how it worked.
So I started with Oktalyzer, an 8 voice tracker and made my first midi-steps with octa-MED, an 8 voice tracker with midi implementation.
That was fun

 

As for myself I just want to get out of computers eventually..

 

No, that is definitely not what I miss about the Amiga -- it had the worst CRT output ever. I also had the TV adapter, which I didn't even bother with.

I completely hated Bars & Pipes when I first got it, because everything was very cartoony-looking and operated on object-based kiddy icons. In other words, if you wanted to quantize a drum track, you pulled a "quantize" icon from the sidebar and stuck it on the "drum track pipe" (there may have been more involved than that; it's been almost thirty years!). However, after messing with it for a short while, I realized just how powerful the toolset was. I did quite a lot of stuff in Music-X, though, including films scores where I had to slave it to SMPTE timecode coming from VHS tape and running into an old-school MOTU SMPTE-to-MIDI beat clocks converter.

 

People sell old SCSI HDs for extraordinarily big prices, when it comes to samplers. It's really just better to buy an SCSI2SD adapter and the cheapest Sandisk SD card.