16kg of Eii Floppies

[obsoletemachines]

hi,
i have been landed with 16kg of EII floppies including k-muse Richard Burmer collection and Northstar.  Now many of the Northstar sounds i can see (and can recall) are to be found in Northstar Phase EIII library at full rate 48khz but the Burmer ones look to be a bit more obscure.  Then there are lots of creative sampling, personal floppies.

Believe they are a film composers library

Has anyone got the means or ability to image and archive these?

Floppies are immaculate, no fungus etc.

I'm in the United Kingdom but i don't have an EII or DPX right now.  I do have SoundDesigner and serial connections via vintage macs.

If the sounds are already archived it would be good to know, so i can scrap these disks.

best

[alka]

There are 18 disks archived for the Burmer collection at the shared box.com folder... looks incomplete by the numbering of them. How many do you have?

I would personally hate to see any of these disks tossed especially the personal ones. Creating quality samples on the EII is a sort of lost skill and think any vintage disks, personal or not, should be archived if possible. I'd gladly help you out, although I am in the States... PM me if you can.

[lunatic]

Pm

[obsoletemachines]

hi,
ok so there are definitely Burmer disks that are not on the archive. for example

'African 1' disks 1 to 5
'The Bill Summers World Music Collection'

Shekere, Maria, Dahomey, Hindewu, and Djembe

So next step is how to get them imaged.
I have an old PC with a 5 1/4 that i used to image PPG disks. is there any dos software that does likewise for EII?

[lunatic]

I think it can be done with EMXP, but esynthesist should know. If you need help, let me know!

[alka]

What operating system are you running on your setup? if you have XP or later you can use EMXP http://www.emxp.net/ If you need the true DOS version - EMX i believe i have a file somewhere.. let me know...

[obsoletemachines]

hi
my 5 1/4 only works fully on my IBM Ps/2 with dos.  The EMXP manual suggests you need Kyroflux.  Is there any ancient dos software for Emu EII imaging like there is for PPG?

[alka]

there is a native DOS version of EMXP called EMX.. i'm asking around for a copy of it currently... stay tuned. Does anyone else have a copy of this program to share?

[Wolfram]

If you have an EII and a old Mac you can transfer it to the Mac and copy the files from the Mac to your PC.
Else you can use an EMuSer and EMXP.

If you don't have an EII and want to read the disks directly into the PC you need an Kyroflux controller.

[alka]

So I'm thinking maybe all you would need is to install the following Omnidisk floppy driver to your computer. http://www.webring.org/l/rd?ring=acorn8bitwebring;id=10;url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Eshlock%2Eco%2Euk%2FUtils%2FOmniFlop%2FOmniFlop%2Ehtm

Not sure you would even need the EMX DOS software unless you wanted to convert the EII banks into something else.. which is not what we're attempting here. Check out the above link...

[esynthesist]

So I'm thinking maybe all you would need is to install the following Omnidisk floppy driver to your computer

No, that won't work.
Omniflop does not support EII floppy disks.
That's simply because the disk format is not even supported by standard PC hardware (more specifically by the floppy disk controllers in PCs). EII have a very exotic disk encoding scheme, with non-standard track/sector sizes and non-standard track/sector headers.
So as Wolfram says, you need a more advanced floppy controller connected to your PC. That's the kryoflux.
It's a good investment, it works great. I use it for both reading and writing Emulator-I and Emulator-II floppy disks.

[alka]

Thanks for the response! makes sense now.

[the_key]

Hi there!
I'm based in  West Yorkshire and own an Emulator II and Oberheim DPX1 and and Emu Emax.

I recently purchased an Emuser which allows me to transfer files between my Apple IMAC and the RS422 ports on both the EII and EMAX which means of the 200 5.25 floppies I own which I copied from original discs back in 1991 I can now load the floppies in to the EII memory and save the image on my IMAC so I have started to do thiss and catalogue my aging floppy discs (some of which will no longer read in the EII drive.

If you want further help  with anything in relation  to your post of 2017 then please drop me a line as i may be able to help.

Thanks

[FrancoisR]

If you have some unrecoverable floppies , I have a Kryoflux that can recover near everything