Destination - Akai S-5000 Series, Z-Series, and MPC-4000/1000

Disk and File Formats One day, Akai decided to improve on it's industry standard S-1000/3000-type series. The result was the S-5000 Series, with it's TV-screen type interface. Wow! The bigger brother S-6000 even enabled the screen to detach from the front panel. Sporting a maximum of 256mb of memory, the the S-5000 series looked great out of the gate. However, initial bugs and customer dissatisfaction worked against it. It took about 18 months to really get the sampler in working order after release. Presently, it's a great piece of gear. It offers neat options such as a USB board (see the aksys description below), multiple outs, and a nice effects board. Akai then took the next step and release the current Z-Series, which sadly eliminates the huge front panel monitor but includes 512mb addressable RAM capacity and 24-bit playback. It's smaller too, taking 2 rack spaces instead of 3. And lately, Akai went back to their popular MPC roots (their current ad campaign touts them as the "original MPC company") and produced the high-end MPC-4000, which reads the S-5000 format and adds all the MPC functionality. And recently, the mini-sized MPC-1000 is making it's debut.

The reason that all these samplers are listed on this page is that they all load the S-5000 format, described below. For brevity, we'll just refer to these as "the S-5000."

aksys
It enables you to pass samples AND programs back and forth with a computer. Thus, you don't need a hard drive or CD-ROM Drive hooked up to it to load sounds. (Although you do need it if you don't have Translator and you want to convert other sampler formats, or if you are on a gig and the computer doesn't tag along.) Not only that, aksys does real time editing and allows hooks to use your favorite sampler editor, etc.

aksys almost makes the S-5000, and when you compare it to other editing programs, this one by far is the best integrated and seamless AND useful program of them all.

Architecture Description
The S-5000, programmatically, doesn't improve enormously on the S-1000/3000 platform, in fact, it's almost exactly the same. The accessories and the memory really pull it ahead. Dual SCSI ports, advanced effects, multiple outputs, and other improvements make the S-5000 a winner.

The S-5000 uses the same architecture as the earlier S-1000/3000 series, each Program uses up to 99 Keygroups, which use 4 Zones to reference the samples. The big advantage is that the sample references in the Zones can be to stereo .awv files, so you don't have to use two Zones to implement a stereo sample.

Disk/File Format
Akai adopted the DOS disk format with this sampler. The Program file is an .akp file, where the samples are .wav files - not unlike the Pulsar/STS format. An Akai Multi is stored as a .akm. In fact, the arrangement of the file in DOS is almost just like the S-1000/3000, just with "tags" on them.