Under Construction

04.10 Transmitting A Sample

A sample which was loaded or imported to the Sample List can be transferred to the Akai by choosing "Transmit Sample ..." from the File menu, by pressing [T] or clicking the icon in the tool box. This will start a sample dump to the Akai following the protocol of the Sample Dump Standard (SDS).


A dialog box popping up is keeping you updated about the dump progress and the estimated time remaining.

When the dump has finished successfully, the sample will be instantly renamed on the Akai as you have chosen and a final dialog box shows the dump's statistics (if activated in the MIDI Setup). Tranferring a sample of precisely 4.0secs to my S3000XL takes me about 3:42mins on my Atari MegaSTe running at 16MHz.

Once a sample was transmitted to the sampler successfully, a check mark in the first column of the Sample List indicates that the sample data was matched between the Atari/AKAINOID and the Akai sampler.

Allthough I haven't really visualised the matter on screen yet, the Sample List actually can be divided into two parts/areas:

  • First area: the samples which already have been transferred to the Akai or originate from the sampler (arrow in the 4th column points to the left or check mark is set) ... and in the
  • Second area: those samples which originate from the Atari's disk and haven't been transmitted to the sampler yet (arrow points to the right, check mark is not set).

You can change the order of samples within the second area by dragging and dropping a selected Sample List item. However you cannot drop a sample into the first area.

One thing about the Sample List and the samples it contains, should still be pointed out allthough you might have already noticed: Only the currently selected sample in the Sample List, whose waveform is also displayed in the Sample Window, is actually loaded to the RAM of your Atari completely including its raw sample data. As soon as you select a different sample in the list all the memory the raw sample data consumes is released and replaced by the data of the new selection given the fact the data has already been matched. The advantage of this agenda is clearly a lot more memory space and hence a possibly longer play time per sample. The disadvantage is that browsing through the list is interrupted regularily by a few seconds of loading the sample data back from disk.