Proprietary Floppy Support

Translator™ 6 reads and writes most proprietary sampler floppy disks and their formats. However, it does so only under the following circumstances:

• Windows only: the Mac does not facilitate the ability to access these disks due to hardware restrictions.
• It must be a internal floppy drive driven by a standard floppy drive controller. USB floppy drives will not work. (Roland floppy disks are an exception.)
• On Windows, you must use the OmniFlop replacement floppy driver. At this writing, you can download this driver at www.shlock.co.uk/Utils/OmniFlop/OmniFlop.htm
• Please note: OmniFlop 64 (the 64-bit version) is not guaranteed to work well. We highly recommend using Windows XP 32-bit operating system.
• Your floppy drive must be assigned to the a: drive, not the b: drive.

(Please note that we are uncomfortable providing support for OmniFlop installation issues. Since this is not our software, we cannot prioritize resources to handle their problems. Generally we are more apt to help if you call us and youa re in front of your computer.)

Proprietary floppies show up under a heading of Floppy A under Proprietary Drives in the Container Pane. You can read off of them and write to them.

Proprietary floppy formats include Ensoniq EPS/ASR, Akai S1000/3000, Roland S-5x/7x, and Emu E3/E4. Kurzweil and MPC use (basically) the standard MS-DOS format can can be read normally. NOTE: Translator does not show the A: or B: drive in Local/External Drives, you have to move the files to your hard drive to access them.

A note about using floppies: We provide this function because we want to be the most complete software in the world when it comes to sampler disk and file formats. We DO NOT provide this function to encourage using floppy disks! Floppy disk technology is over 30 years old and really you shouldn't be using it under normal circumstances. Most samplers have SCSI interface options, if not standard, and you should be using that to get decent performance and workflow out fo your sampler.

Multi-Disk Floppies
Multi-disk floppy sets are defined as files on floppies that are split up into several parts on other floppy disks. Multi-disk support is not complete as of this version and is incomplete, so officially we do not support reading or writing multi-disk floppies. (We do support multi-disk floppy images.)

Why Mac's and USB floppy drives can't read proprietary floppies
Mac's with internal floppies (old Mac's!) can't read those type of floppies as their proprietary controller does not allow physical modification thorough software. USB floppies do not work because the USB connection only allows read and write commands, since the controller is within the USB drive/casing. It does not allow control of the physical mechanism through software.

All these floppy controllers are hard-set to read and write the standard 9-sector DOS floppy format, and can't be modified via software to read and write the 10-sector Ensoniq/Akai/Roland/other ones.

Windows with a internal floppy controller (on the motherboard or a card slot) work because those floppy controllers have a standard method of controlling the physical mechanism of floppy drive itself. We use a replacement floppy driver called OmniFlop (for XP, Vista, Win7/8 and above) to accomplish this task.