Best option for Emax sample library

[kimzim]

Hi,

I'm a newbie Emax owner and I managed to get hold of an SE Plus-version. It came with a SCSI ZIP-drive and 5 ZIP-disks with factory sounds. The floppy drive (slim version) is also working well. However I'm not sure what path I should choose when it comes to building a good library of sounds for the Emax. What are the pros and cons of the alternatives below:

1. Buy/exchange floppies
2. Buy/exchange ZIP-disks with banks
3. Get old Mac with Sound Designer for Emax (I have the serial cable)
4. Get old PC with floppy drive and Windows XP and use EMXP (?)
5. Get a new PC with emuser (USB) and use EMXP (?)
6. Get HxC Floppy drive emulator (and what software?)
7. SMAX with emuser (works with OS X but is beta-software)

I'm a Mac user, not used to PC/Windows. What would you choose in my position? Of course I'd like to get hold of as many good sounds for my sampler as possible and also a convenient way of archiving and loading the sounds.

Any tips? Your thoughts would be very much appreciated.

PS. I'm also planning to get an EII in the future so I need to ask the same questions with regard to this sampler as well. 

Thanks again,
Kim

[lunatic]

I have both EII & Emax and I use an Emuser with EMXP. You can use the Emuser also with SMAX, so it is both PC & Mac compatible. Transfers are faster then with HxC and you need only one EMuser for both samplers...

[esynthesist]

Since your Emax has SCSI, I would definitely try to use SCSI as well (besides an EmuSer) because SCSI is very fast (a lot faster than HxC/Floppy and also much faster than the EmuSer communication, which still takes between 30 and 40 seconds for loading a bank)
ZIP is not very reliable though, but you can connect a CF card reader to the SCSI port instead of a ZIP drive, and use CF cards as "Emax hard disks". Note however that only certain CF card drives are compatible with the Emax; more information can be found on the Emax Yahoo group where member Ted Summers is the specialist in this area.

To store sound banks on the CF card, EMXP can be used - or you can use the EmuSer to transfer sound banks to the Emax with either EMXP or SMAX and then save these banks to the CF card on the Emax itself.
Note that EMXP can be used on a Mac (with the EmuSer and also for reading/writing CF cards or ZIP disks), but of course you will need to run it in a Windows Emulator (Parallels, VMWare) or with Boot Camp. I'm not sure if it works with Wine and other free emulators...

[kimzim]

Many thanks for your reply, still thinking about which way to go.