Hi, juts dusted off the cobwebs on my old akai 2000 and decided to fire it up and start archiving some old tunes, possible even resurect some of them.

What I wanted to do was connect up and old mac g4 and archive all the floppy disk data onto a hard drive using akai M.E.S.A. So, i bought and old mac from ebay which was supposed to be work but wasnted and I am now having trouble tracking one down with the required specs, even then I am told there are hoops to jump through with mesa.

I am wondering if there is a better way...

Can the AKAI s5000 / s6000 samplers load up old s2000 projects and run them without any hassle?, if this is the case I should be able to hook up the s6000 straight to my windows pc using a USB cable.

I need to know for sure though before I sack off the mac idea and buy a used s5000 / 6000 on ebay.

any help would be greatly appreciated.

Yes.

An S5/6000 will read S2000 floppies fine and you can then 'archive' them over USB using ak.Sys (I was part of that whole product development and UI process for Akai Japan back in the day).

ak.Sys is still available as a download

The only (slight) problem is finding a computer and OS that can still run ak.Sys. A new Mac won't (and I gather a new PC won't either) but given that you bought an old Mac (OS9?) to run M.E.S.A., that would be ideal (assuming it has USB) - I think the OS9 Mac version of ak.Sys was probably the best.

Some idea of what Mac you have would help.

M.E.S.A. was a bold idea but the fact that it relied on SCSI kind of let it down. The USB employed in ak.Sys was a far more elegant solution and although it could be a bit squinky from time to time, it was generally very good and reliable (I had no problems with it on my OS9 Mac and developed a ton of Akai library on it - even the OSX port was fairly good but missed a bit of functionality).

Cheers,


Stephen

Great, thanks for your reply. Well, I got a mac on ebay which was supposed to be running OS8 but when it arrived it wouldnt boot so I am going to get a refund, i would normally have a tinker with it myself but beyond booting into disk manager there doesnt look like there is anything i can do as I have no OS disk.

I'm still undecided about which way to go with this now as If I get the s6000 it will can happily run up akai.sys on my windows 7 pc using xp pro in a vmware image so that isnt going to be a problem, however I was concerned mainly that you wouldnt be able to load the projects as they are from disk, ie programs, samples, effects and multi file and have them just "work" without any fiddling. I have since decided to try get my hands on a cheap zip drive as all I really want to do is load up the tracks, record them on my pc and have them off the floppies as they are starting to deteriorate. ONce I have everything archived onto either zip or mesa i can start looking at what tracks I want to update / remaster, these old tracks were created in the early nineteens when I had no synths or outboard gear, all we had was the s2000 with an eb16 effects card, 8 meg of ram and an atari so all the tracks are 100% sample based.