Akai S-612 sample dump info –
New 4/30/02I recently found myself assisting someone with getting his Akai S-612 sampler to
dump its sample via the MIDI port. While the old DOS version of Samplevision will
easily accomplish this task, not everyone has an old DOS machine or MPU-401 MIDI
card to run the program. So, I have gone through the process of capturing the sample
request hex string codes and the format with which the S-612 returns the data. By
sending these codes to your S-612 and having a receive buffer open, you can indeed
cause your S-612 sampler to dump its sample via the MIDI port. The person who I
assisted has some computer programming skills (I do not) and is planning to write a
simple sample dump program for the Akai S-612 to run on a more modern Windows
based machine. When he sends it to me, I will make it available for download here.
Until then, here is the HEX data and formatting information if you want to play around:
Send this Hex string to the S-612 MIDI-IN port:
The sampler responds with (71 bytes):
6 byte header
Send this Hex string to the S-612 MIDI-IN port:
The sampler responds with (519 bytes):
6 byte header
Repeat this Hex string to the S-612 MIDI-IN port:
The sampler responds with (519 bytes):
6 byte header
Repeat
F0 47 00 41 20 21 F7 until sample dump is complete.The sample size in the S-612 is always 32768 samples @ 12 bits. Therefore, 2 bytes
of data are required to transfer each individual sample via MIDI. Therefore, each of the
512 bytes of sysex data contains 256 12 bit samples. The hand shaking process that is
described above must be repeated 128 times to complete the entire 32768 sample
dump. 256 x 128 = 32768.
I hope this information may be useful to some S-612 owners out there.