There’s one available for pretty cheap, with an SSD upgrade and some sort of ventilation installed, hah. Now these old units have an excellent sounding timestretch algorithm and a great bitcrusher, which is why i’m considering buying it.
My question is, is there some sort of software for MacOs for sample management or other utility available? I don’t necessarily want to use it for other than sample mangling, which would be a lot easier if I could manage the samples from my computer.
Anyone still using these? How are you incorporating them to your workflow?
Decades ago there was akaisys that worked via scsi , and midi sample transfer which was incredibly slow
Personally I’d never return back to the huge box, Tiny screen even if it’s got better storage.
The multi out board and fx boards are stupidly expensive … last fx board j saw was £380ish on gumtree
I’m not entirely sure it’s got a great time stretch either ( it’s not real-time … has to be processed and it’s quite slow )
The main advantage over elektron style samplers is the polyphony / key groups etc - it can actually play more than one sample on the same channel !! . But that’s a separate discussion.
I’ve got an A3000 sampler here - sat in a rack … Ive been tempted to throw it in the dumpster many times. Easier than packing / posting it…. Even with 8 outs, fx card , hard drive , better screen and more encoders than the s2000 .
On the off chance you’re not aware of it, could Akaizer not get close enough with a lot less expense/hassle if the timestretch is the main consideration?
I know emulations/recreations are rarely exactly the same, but still.
Yeah not interested in plugins, this would be an fx box essentially for time stretching or bit crushing samples to be put into my Octatrack. It’s quite cheap and I’ve kinda wanted one for years. Thanks though! I’ll check out the links.
Akai s2000 is the most vanilla akai that exists. There is no magic there. The converters kinda suck. I owned one for years because it was the only sampler I could afford.
If you want a sampler that actually has some mojo get an emu or kurzweil or any other akai that isn’t an S2000
I did way more Cool Akai Stuff within the first week of getting my Polyend Tracker than I did in years of owning an S3000XL, one of the nicer bland Akais.
If I was going to get a hardware sampler again, I’d lean towards one of the late EMU samplers that have the crazy filters. But a version of that filter module is available in Euro, so it’s tough for me to get excited about vintage samplers.
Beyond the signature Akai timestretch algorithm, I’m not sure I’m missing much compared to the Tracker and OT.
Not to be dramatic, but the S2000 put me off ever wanting use Akai stuff for 25 years (the MPC Live mk2 has totally won me over). I still have nightmares about how you had to load the OS every time you turned it on from multiple floppies but then to be able to sample you have to press about 13 buttons and then spin the tiny wheel about 300 times.
I mean maybe get one if it’s cheap and you’re interested or you’re a masochist…
IIRC the base model has 2mb ram, I bought one new in 90’s and got the 32mb upgrade along with lfo board and fx board (didn’t have the multiple outs) it was a pain in the butt to use, navigating each page sequentially back and forth. I did add a scsi drive too, sold it all for £150 around 2006. I would never get one again.
Saying that, different strokes for different folks….if it’s cheap then why not….you’ll never know unless you try one
Had to use this opportunity to share the fact that the Avalanches created this amazing album on an Akai S2000. They must’ve had an immense amount of patience.
Yes, MESA and Recycle 2.0. MESA stands for Modular Editing System by Akai, and Recycle is sample slicing software by Propellorhead. Recycle v2.0 is the final version that includes the capability to connect with a sampler over SCSI. Neither app will work on modern machines, the last supported Mac OS is 9.2. You’d also need a computer with a SCSI interface. Long story short, it’s a big investment to be able to edit patches on a computer, and not worth it. Also as others have mentioned, the 2000 is a really basic model.
There are multiple storage solutions that allow you to get samples on or off the machine, but the only one worth looking at imo is ZuluSCSI. This is coming from someone who uses a PiSCSI, which I could not in good conscience ever suggest to someone who isn’t handy with Raspberry Pi’s (following the installation instructions on the github won’t install all the dependences required, it’s effectively broken).
There’s someone (@drummachinefunk on instagram) in one of the Akai sampler FB groups who’s showing off an iOS/iPad editor for the 950, and I think if there’s interest they said they might consider other models. That was posted about a year ago so who knows.
I’ve considered starting a dedicated Akai sampler thread to dump all this useless knowledge because there’s a surprising amount of heresay floating about online, especially in the fb groups which seem to be the most active place for the old sampler codgers to get together.
I recently bought an S2000 w/maxed out memory for 40 Euros. Very happy with it, easy to figure out, quick to zip around the various functions, resampling with a nice bit of aliasing. The small screen doesn’t display much info, so it forces you into a bit of a linear/procedural work flow. I got the hang of it after a while. The sampler sounds clean and plain, but complements other, more lofi/characterful samplers nicely. I hooked an external ZuluSCSI to the port in the back, didn’t need to repair or mod the sampler further.
As for more advanced programming with key groups/layers, there is a contemporary version of the Recycle/MESA/SCSI workflow: Renoise for editing, Awave for format conversion, Akaiutil for disk imaging and ZuluSCSI for transport/storage. The process works well with all the samplers that Awave supports, which is a whole bunch.
Here’s a cool video showing this method. Of course, this being an S950 he starts by sampling into the Akai, then goes on to chop in the computer, before storing the final samples/program back in the Akai:
Soul oddity made a lot of their stuff in the S2000. You can hear the filter’s, uh, character all over it. Great record but no reason to seek out an s2000. You had to have patience (still do I think) to make music with old hardware back then. Everything was slow unless you had a bunch of x0x stuff or whatever. Soul Oddity later became Phonecia btw.
Yeah. I bought one about ten years ago for an absurdly low price. I honestly haven’t done fuck all with it. I keep it around for some silly reason. Maybe I like the Akai beige and the aesthetic appeal of the jog wheel. It would be more trouble to sell it and ship it somewhere than it is to just keep it in the stack of misfit rack gear that I’ve accumulated over the years.
I bought one in 1998 and returned it a week later in favor of an Ensoniq ASR-X. Absolute PITA to program and you can get that functionality and far more for free nowadays. Refused to buy anything from Akai again until last year when I bought a used MPC Live for cheap, which is the option I recommend you pursue.
The S2000 is nothing special sonically, it’s slow as mud, and the buttons, jog wheel, and 2 line LCD are misery inducing. The Ensoniq shared some of those faults but had a far better workflow, sounded incredible, and had insanely good effects. If you want to go retro, it’s a far better choice even though you might need to replace the encoders.
Hello , someone gave me an old S950 some time ago but like all those very old akai sampler the screen is nearly invisible, could i ask you where did you buy the replacement and if it’s an easy task to solder ?
