Virtual Drives - Creating

You can create a Virtual Drive in 2 ways:

Create a New Virtual Drive From Scratch

• Click on the menu item Tools, click on Virtual Drives, click on New...
• Translator will create an Virtual Drive, and then ask you to format and size it
• "CD-ROM" is simply a macro for 650mb. Custom allows you to make the Virtual Drive any size you want.

Create a New Virtual Drive from an existing SCSI-ATAPI Drive

• Click on the menu item Tools, click on Virtual Drives, click on the respective drive you want to create a Virtual Drive out of
• A Save As Dialog will appear, asking you where you want to store the file containing the Virtual Drive and what to name it (default is the name of the drive itself).
• The dialog to the right will appear. Here's some important background information about drives, especially CD-ROM's. There are really three possible sizes of a device.
• One is the actual physical size of the device. For hard drives it is the actual unformatted capacity of the device. For CD-ROM's it is no more than 650mb, and it is the measure of the "written to" part of the drive, as recorded on the Q-code section of the CD itself.
• Another is the formatted capacity of the drive. This can vary. For instance, many CD-ROM's, even commercial ones, are composed using a larger hard drive (greater than 650mb) and the CD author makes sure he does not write any more than 650mb on the disk. The hard drive data is then raw-copied onto a CD. This makes the physical capacity usually 650mb, but the formatted capacity is the larger figure of what the hard drive was formatted for in the first place (say 2.1, or something else).
  The formatted capacity can also be less than physical capacity, if the CD author just puts in some large figure to burn a CD, but the actual formatted is less than that amount. (We see this frequently with Akai CD's, which can be no more than 511mb but the physical capacity is recorded as 650mb.)
  Such discrepancies are possible because devices don't care if the formatted capacity is larger than the physical capacity as long as it is never called to read sectors that don't exist.
• Lastly, there is the highest sector that has legitimate information. Translator looks at the file allocation table of the drive, and calculates what the minimum size of what the Virtual Drive would have to be in order to encompass all readable data.
• The dialog to the right also enables you to grab a custom section of the device. Whatever floats your fancy.
• Why all the options? There are different reasons for creating a Virtual Drive. One would be for backup, and if the user never cares to write to it, the smallest possible size would be the most desirable. Another reason for Virtual Drives is if you want to modify an already existing volume - in which case you'd want the proper formatted capacity of the device so you don't make mistakes in writing something that is over-range.
• Once you've made your selections, Translator will start creating an Virtual Drive of the selected device, and when it is done, it will show in the Virtual Drives area, only if it is of proprietary origin (Akai, Roland, etc.)

You can delete a Virtual Drive by simply right-clicking on it and selecting "Delete." This brings up the dialog on the right. You can destructively delete the file that represents the Virtual Drive, or you can simply remove the reference to the Virtual Drive on the Translator interface without erasing the Virtual Drive from your hard drive.

You can also delete a Virtual Drive by deleting it using any other Windows method. When Translator starts up again or Refreshes, and it finds the file doesn't exist, it will unregister it automatically.

There may be instances where you have reinstalled Translator or did something to erase the references to the Virtual Drive in the system registry. You can "register" them back into Translator by using the Register Virtual Drives menu option under Tools. You can also unregister your Virtual Drives by selecting Erase References under Tools, and select Virtual Drives. This does not erase your Virtual Drives, it simply erases the reference within Translator for it.

Once you have created a Virtual Drive, you can drag and/or drop and perform functions just like any other SCSI-ATAPI Drive. That is one purpose of Virtual Drives - to emulate the existence of an external SCSI Drive that you would hook up to your sampler in software, on your computer.