jrg56

I'm nor pushing any particular brand or auction service so please don't misunderstand, but E-mu has a small piano module that can be picked up for as little as $40.00 add a cheap keyboard controller either Midiman or E-Mu or whatever and you might have what your looking for. Also saw a Proteus 1 for under 100 on E-Bay today. Older tech to be sure but quite suited to what you want IMHO. There are also often Alesis Nano-Piano, Nano-Bass and Nano-Synth modules for under 100 that when coupled with a keyboard controller could be helpful.

Kind of depends on your price range, I have bought several on E-Bay, search by brand name. (emu,e-mu) yields several. You can pick up a module and a keyboard controller fairly cheap. If you can afford it a Proteus 2000 and an X-Board is a pretty good way to go to get some serious sound. Latter if you can afford them you can add additional ROMs to the Proteus 2000 yielding an incredible pallet of sounds. Search for Rolland, Korg, and my favorite Alesis as well.

So here we are, I have a Computer with XP and a Adaptec 2940UW SCSI controller (ID7) a Toshiba CD Rom TM3301E1 (ID3) a 9Gig SCSI HP Hard Drive (ID1) and an ESI32 32meg (ID5) hooked up in that order. Strange things happen. When I first hooked it all up the Computer saw the CD the HD and the ESI32 but Sound Forge 6 could not write WAV files to the ESI32. ESI-WIN saw all the equipment. I formatted the HD from the ESI32 and it works fine the CD works fine. However now the computer does not see the HD though it does see the CD. ESI-WIN sees the CD and the Sampler not the HD. The HD works I can send WAV files from the computer to the ESI32 for about 3-5 times then I get time out errors. I have to shut the ESI32 down reconfigure it in SoundForge 6 and save the configuration. This works but it gets annoying because I have to repeat the process so often. The Apaptec SCSI card is self terminated internally and on the external chain. When it works it works GREAT but for only a few transfers. Taking it down to just the computer and the ESI32 does not fix the problem. Plus I need the HD hooked up so I can save banks to it that I am loading into the ESI32 (waiting to get all these other bugs fixed before I try that). Anyway I don't think it's a termination issue but am not sure I have no documentation on the Toshiba CD and can't seem to find anything online but broken links. The HD probably isn't the problem as it persists even when it's not in the chain plus other than the computer not seeing it, it works fine. JRG

Not sure the problem isn't partially in my copy of Sound Forge 6.0, it seems to work well when it works but then suddenly starts getting timeout errors. If I use the Sampler>Configure and re-save it starts working again. When it works it works great. As stated before this is a lot of fun. You haven't lived till you've heard Godzilla as performed by the aflack duck . The ESI32 can see and work with the full 9Gig on my HD, extremly happy with that. I can now save and load banks. Time to start building banks of my own from all the Samples on the CDs. On another front, I picked up an E-MU Orbit 9090 V2 on E-bay the other day, I bought on a whim kind of been shying away from it because of it's dance planet moniker. This thing is Awesome had to do a reinitialize to get everything working but Wow there are some really great and usefully sounds in here. Not to mention the Beats and Drum Kits (not a drummer so having these is really helpful). Also got the Alesis Vintage Synthesizer and Beat Boxes Q card for my QS6.1 Wow! I keep waiting for lightning to strike me, mere mortal man was not meant to wield such sonic power. Talk about thunder of the Gods some of these patches are outstanding (IMHO). JRG Film at Eleven

Well at least for a while everything was working , then I started getting timeout errors when trying to transfer WAV files from Sound Forge 6.0. HD formatted out to 10Gig which I found interesting since the manual says OS 3.02 won't do anything bigger than 4. Of course that doesn't mean it will write to all 10Gig only time will tell. On another note ESI-Win now sees the drives and the sampler so I should be able to make my image files and burn them to CD. Anys got to start getting ready for Guitar lesson, I'll play with this more latter. JRG Film at Eleven

Niot sure how far I've got but something is happening. I hooked the ESI32 Directly to the computer the SCSI card setup still didn't see it but when I went on into XP it wasn't there then on a whim I did add new hardware and it showed up. So after going through the 8 discovery cycle Sound Forge 6.0 again transfered samples to the ESI32. Spent hours playing with WAV files that I had on my computer and the ones of the CDs I bought from Sound Load. More fun than humans should have . So this morning I decided to get adventurous and try to hook the HD directly to the ESI32, at first no joy, I couldn't figure it out it was manually terminated and the ID was set to 0. Well after messing around with it for a while I discovered the ESI32s ID could not be set lower than 1 then I noticed the floppy drive was labeled as D0 so I set the HD SCSI ID to 1 and suddenly the ESI32 sees it. So I figure it will take a while to format (it's doing it now). Once it's formatted I plan to hook it all back together and see what happens. There is also a setting under the SCSI to avoid host I set this to 7 as that is the ID of the SCSI card in the computer. Anyway I think I'm on the road to having the system do what I want. If I get all these things working together the next step is to figure out how to make and save my own bank to the HD and then eventually burn it to a CD of my own. JRG Film at Eleven

The Agony ... The ESI32 still sees the SCSI CD player but can't see beyond it. Yesterday the computer made it all the way to the ESI32 several times. Then I tried to initialize the SCSI HD Because the ESI32 wasn't seeing it. The ESI32 disappeared it's no longer in the list of devices under Windows, and when I reboot and look in the cards utility it doesn't see the ESI32 anymore. I thought maybe the SCSI card on the ESI32 had gone bad but I can still see the SCSI CD rom and load from it. I'm guessing the Computer SCSI card is still ok or the CDrom wouldn't be terminated anymore. I took the HD out of the equation and now the card sees the CD rom but Windows doesn't and Windows does not see the ESI32. HELP!! JRG Film at Eleven

Drat fomatting got screwed up the order of the ids is the sane as device order got to run JRG

Path ESI32 --> Toshiba CD --> HP 9Gig --> Computer Host id5 id4 id0 id7 SCSI card in host is set to autoterminate I changed it to manual terminate the one time it worked. Now it doesn't see the ESI32 at all the 8 entries for it in Device Manager have disappeared and using the cards software (before boot completes it no longer sees the ESI32. It did at first. I have to go to work I'll work on it more when I get home. I am psyched that I was actually able to load the WAV files on to it at least once. Next step is to take devices out of the chain and see if that drive may be throwing everything off. ESI32 doesn't even see it it's not been formatted Computer sees it but can't initalize it. I think it's the weak link. JRG Film at eelven

The Saga Continues .... After much pain and frustration I have a Working SATA card and SCSI card in the computer at the same time. First the good news. THE COMPUTER SEES THE ESI 32. Sound Forge 6 was able to send WAV files to the sampler and it played them. Now for the Bad news The ESI 32 does not see the SCSI hard drive that is in the chain. XP sees the drive but will not initialize it and gets an error every time it trys. The SCSI Utility shows the drive and will allow me to do a low level format of it. It's a 9Gig drive and I realize that's bigger than what the ESI32 with OS 3.02 allows but the company I bought it from assured me it would work. I would think if it wouldn't work with the ESI32 that it should at least work with Windows. JRG Film at Eleven

Got the cable installed the SCSI card and the SATA controller went crazy and started insisting that I create a drive array. If I do that will wipe out the data on the drive. I'm now in the process of trying to get a new drive controller card. I may head out to the storage unit and just grab another computer and move the SCSI card to it. Don't have any librarian software as yet, my first task is to see if I can get WAV files loaded onto the ESI32 using SOUND FORGE 6. I downloaded a free vocoder "AnalogX" and made a cool wav I'd like to try. I'm on my way out to try and buy a SATA card locally if I can't find that I'm heading for the storage unit to get another computer. Picked up to Cd's of samples from Syntec very nice sounds for the ESI32. Got the Proteus/1 with Protologic board, really cool unit. Now I need to do something different for a mixer setup. One of my Yamaha MV802 is making noise and I need at least another 4 inputs. Just about all the E-Mus claim that you can plug a cable into one of the extra outputs that if setup properly will send the input to the main outs but I can't figure out if I need to make a cable or if I can buy them pretty made the guys at the music store just looked at me like I was crazy when I asked about it. JRG

Good idea, I can only hope it can receive midi messages that might control it's function. It has a A and B MAC type serial ports on the back and I suspect if I had the software I could make it work. I actually have an old Apple computer from the same time frame this thing must be from. However even without getting it to do what I want it works fine as a Midi Merge/Thru box. I'll keep looking SCSI cables arrived today and now it's time to hook up the ESI32 to the computer. That's going to be fun I'm sure JRG

Your right about that, the ROMs cost more than I paid for the Proteus 2000. I'm not sure of the cost in relation to setting up a complete computer and buying the software to go with a VST. Personally I think keeping the load off the computer processor by using Real Synths would be a benefit, but then you have to worry about getting the sound back into the computer. I'm getting an Alesis IO2 Audio Midi USB Interface for that purpose. Hopefully SCSI cables will arrive today and I can continue trying to hook my ESI32 to my computer . JRG

Thanks for the link John, unfortunately this thing is so old it's not in the list. I contacted support didn't get a reply. It's working just fine as a MIDI through box, still haven't made it over to the MAC store apparently they moved it. JRG

Well, E-Win trying to write to floppy was a no go, not sure why. I took the DISK to the ESI32 and formatted it in the EOS formatt E-Win sees it but when it tries to write the imported wav it fails. No idea why. Ah well, SCSI cable still hasn't arrived. JRG