|
I've had my Esi for a couple of years now and it has proved to be a real work horse in my studio. For the price the features are outstanding, and the 64 note polyphony allows quite a lot of freedom in sequencing arangements. A few things that have made the Esi so useable for me:
I picked up a secondhand internal SCSI zip and it slots in where the floppy usualy sits. Still had to adapt the scsi cable to run from the ESI board to the zip, then to the outside socket but this isnt too hard.
Chicken Systems 'Translator' software can be used to change loads of sample types to ESI format but costs £100. Still this is cool cos there's loads of free soundfonts out there which can be downloaded + converted.
You can avoid buying a SCSI cd drive: Download ESI-Win [find it on google] and then use it to copy emu sample banks from Emu cds in your computer's CD drive to a SCSI storage device like the ZIP drive. you still need a SCSI card though [£10 second hand] to conect Emu + storage device to your computer.
Avoid external Hard Drive: Buy a second hand internal SCSI drive under 9 Gigs, put it in your computer to give it power and conect it to the internal scsi cable from your scsi card. Now the Emu can access it directly because theyre on the same SCSI chain. Have the Emu format it and read it from your computer using ESI-Win. Easy. [You have to set the intenal drive to terminate, and set the SCSI card not to terminate.
I hope some of that made sense.
So with the esi you can [if you set up as above]have an internal zip, internal hard drive [in the PC] with no extra crapy power cords and non rack mountable gear etc.
Damn good piece of kit actually!!
PS. Use Propellorheads Re-cycle with it, it's grand.
|
listings
