Buy EMU from Creative Labs

Virtual instruments HALion
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#1

Wouldn’t it be a shame to let Emu X go down in flames?

  • YES! Makes me madsad!
  • yeah, but I’m too lazy to type anything
    • i n d i f f e r e c e *
  • no, and I’m too lazy to type anything
  • NO! Let that pile of crap burn!

0 voters

Yeah! That’s what I call a feature request haha!

Creative has about killed Emu already!
Emu have the best computer based real sampler in history.
Z-plane filters, Twistaloop, Twistawave, Function Generators, Routing <> Modulation (Yep, X3 > HAL here!), Synthswipe and the list goes on …
They have in addition to the regular 328p manual a 152p tutorial collection for all levels.
I love it!!!
Now it looks like the ugly duckling turning into the dying swan!!! It just hurts my brain to see all that go down in flames :astonished: :cry:

It probably has something to do with X3 looks and acts in many ways like a windows 98 program.
It’s ugly, pure and simple!
Emu have no idea what internet presence is and they’re just dying!
I guess Creative has no clue that they’re killing the holy grail of samplers.
Even http://www.emu.com is redirected to http://www.creative.com/emu :astonished:

I’ve been checking the HALion 4 demo out for a few days and it’s great, even greater as an integrated sampler in the middle of Cubase. It’s beautiful! it’s bendable, customizable, workable. It has lots of features and sounds of course great. I think I have to buy that bastard haha!

Still … I have X3 on my XP boot and it won’t go anywhere soon. Rather the contrary! :sunglasses:

What if Yamaha/Steinberg bought Emu and merged into HALionator X or whatever, call it whatever.
Having all the golden tools in one sampler inside Cubase would make the competitors green!!!
I don’t know but maybe Creative is just waiting for somebody to buy this EMU thing the cat dragged in?
Maybe the price tag is just right now?
Maybe all those revitalized features will be more than worth it in a few years time in HALion 5 or 6? :sunglasses:

Or maybe that’s not the way it works at all in the real world? :confused: :blush:

Thanks for reading!

PS If any of the mods read this and like it maybe you can push it upwards in the organization … before it’s too late?

1 Like
#2

Ha!Ha!

Dear Father (or Mother) Christmas,

It is very sad that the mighty EMU may be going down the proverbial pan: please can you listen to Mr Ulf and stop the evil Creative empire from consigning EMU to history and make the kind Steinbergians buy it.

Thank you and Merry Christmas,

Steve.

#3

Yeeaaaaah! That’s the spirit! Totally silly but totally silly ideas are part of what we have to put up with every day so why don’t we create the silly ideas ourselves??? At least it can’t hurt … :mrgreen:

Or can it? :confused:

#4

That’s what they said when we asked for W7x64 drivers for the Midex … but then, after a mere 7 years of asking … :open_mouth:

+1 for Emulator-X features to be added to HALion 4 !!!

#5

more like " one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind" kind of a deal, isn’t it haha?

but they did it!!! :astonished:

BTW before Creative Labs bought EMU, Emu bought Ensoniq which was a highly creative little company with unusual solutions, partly because they operated in an era where no standards had been set, so they had to set them themselves. And so they did, with the Mirage protosampler, EPS16+, ASR10 (with Transwave™ loops! :sunglasses: ), ASR-X which was another thing altogether, a series of synths and last but not least PARIS hard disk recording system that in this day and age is nothing, but 10 years ago a lot of people thought highly of. I’ve just heard the rumors though.

Buy it, rip it apart, sniff it, contemplate it and use it to conquer the future …

#6

And what do you know? :astonished:
http://kerrygalloway.com/ParisForums/
Alive and kiking! :laughing:

#7
  • X3 !

Seriously, it will sadly never happend, but knowing that E-Mu is buyed by Yamaha, Apple (hmm… no, not them… :mrgreen: ), or a similar company which is ready to truely support the existing culture and products from it would be the best new of the year, even better than if Steiny provided an unshrinking project window in Cubase, this says it all… :mrgreen:

#8

I am adding my opinions to this and E-mu going down the drain is more or less an era coming to an end.

It is of course inevitable since all things comes to that, eventually… but since they already have the product and can (one would hope) easily update it and add some marketing.

I still have an Emulator 2, 3 and even an E-Synth (lent out though) plus a number of their modules. Still running just fine, but used less with the newer software stuff around.

Still, Creative which obviously have the last word, seem more interested in pursuing “Sound Blaster”… (Notice how their sound cards are now “X”-Fi.)

And I guess the reason why I sound a bit sarcastic towards “Creative” is because when I think of E-mu I think professional equipment, but the name Creative (to me) means “toys” (in comparison, I mean). I don’t care what kind of labels (THX, etc) they associate with it, because it would take a lot to change it from being a PC sound card company. Right or wrong, that’s how I think of them.

Revive E-mu in the Emulator X4 in VST3.5 format/functionality and ship all the X libraries with it! :wink:

#9

E-MU is alive and well

E-MU - Home

#10

That’s some serious blast from the past! Unfortunately you’ll find that only the zombified brand name survives.

As for Emulator X, I was able to use the still-available Extreme Sample Converter to read my X libraries and convert them into something HALion could read, and it worked quite well.

1 Like
#11

Interesting, i wonder if those samples are still considered IP protected…

#12

on a side note, the original brain behind E-MU is the brain behind Rossum Electro-Music

www.rossum-electro.com (rossum-electro.com)

35th Anniversary SP-1200™ Renovation (rossum-electro.com)

#13

Cool! He needs an “I survived Create Labs” T-shirt …

#14

I’m still using Emulator X3, here. :sauropod:

I was expecting the worse when retrieving its original Cds and serial number to install it on my new system, about one year ago. It went without hassle and since, has worked perfectly.

Still, and to preserve the work I have done through the years with it, I would like to find a more recent sampler with more or less the same features (among them, multitimbrality, crossfade velocities samples mapping, ‘cords’ matrix-like allocation of CCs) and, most of all, a full compatibility with the .exb format.

I made a thread about that here, more than a year ago, as a pre-sale one, and considering Halion : never received an answer from Steinberg… So, I stick with what is , IMO, still the best and easiest to use true sampler of our 21st century…

#15

The .exb files can be read by Extreme Sample Converter and saved as e.g. Kontakt NKI or SF2, which HALion can read directly. I can’t imagine Steinberg would ever revive the Emulator X3, and the file format is probably not widespread enough to warrant the development time needed to add compatibility as a feature. For this reason I bit the bullet when HALion 4 was released and jumped ship.

HALion 6 can record (i.e. actually sample) and can be set up to “clone” anything capable of making a sound when it receives a MIDI note, including hardware synths and plugins. This is a great feature!

1 Like
#16

I have ESC still installed on my old system. I purchased it several years ago, as I was seriously considering Kontakt, at the time, while seeing E-Mu being destroyed by Creative. I quickly changed my mind, seeing the Kontakt Player at work with what was supposed to replace NI B4 and few others added free libraries : horrible interface, meh sounds and playability, this, with the .nki files generated by ESC that weren’t usable with it.

So, I’m wondering about these :

  • even if I reinstall ESC (would have to retrieve the necessary files and the account login), will it work under Windows 10 pro ? And how to update it (the version I have is not the most recent 3.6.1 one), as it seems to be now a more or less abandonware ?
  • To which point the .nki files will preserve all the data included in the .exb ones (especially the velocity cross fadings - Yes, it’s essential for me and I don’t ask about eventual .SF2 ones, as I’m almost sure that this format doesn’t support it) ?

Indeed, and it could help me to finally sample most things from my hardware synths (which are clearly aging and not immortal either…) : I could do this with X3, but procrastination has prevailed, as I’m still trying to find away to efficiently do this (number of velocity layers, sampling intervals, and so on…).

I’m still considering it, actually. But let’s say that, as X3 is still working on my new setup, the switch process has become less urgent (procrastination again… :grin:).

Thanks for your answer… :slightly_smiling_face:

#17

Oh, man! Did you have to drag this old thread back to life haha! :flushed: :rofl:

Anyways … this is 2021 and I have an retired old computer that’s pretty damn good when it was new. Too good to retire so I changed my mind and now it’s up and running on a dual boot with Win7 amd … don’t laugh … winXP. There was a time when that crap was cutting edge and some of it still has some unique features, and I won’t let that slip into oblivion without at least taking a deep look at what was so cutting edge about it.

Like the sound card I have in that computer which is a Emu 1820M. I also have a Emu Xboard 61 keyboard controller and a while back I got Emulatr X2 up and running. It uses the 1820M card as a dongle haha. Weirdest concept ever but whatever. So that’s essentially a “E-MU Digital Audio System” as I think it was marketed as at the time and it works! It’s not only the X2 sampler but it interacts with the 1820M hardware (also including a PCI card for the breakout box and a PCI card for sync stuff) so I have a few stereo ins and outs to use and I pulled them out to the front via a patch to the left of me which is connected to the main patch to the right of me and the Steinberg UR824.

There is also a software PatchDSP app in doing some deeply integrated stuff in between the hardware and the Emulator X2. In adition to that the Xboard has some old skool rotary knobs (not endless encoder, alas) that takes you all the way into the center of the Emulator X2.

All in all, it’s still to this day a system hard to beat. And some of those sounds you get out of there is just not something I can do any other. The main difference between X2 and X3 is that X3 is 64 bit, then there is some unmixing feature like what you can do MUCH better in SpectralLayers these days. It’s sad that the development was killed off a decade ago but for now it works for me.

#18

I should add it’s not the samples that makes the Emulator. It’s the tools and filters and what have you, so sampling format conversion is kind of a futile idea if you ask me. I’d argue I could come up with sounds that fit my ideas better with simple waveforms and the tools in the Emulator eco system than any of the multi sampled sounds from actually huge package of CD-ROMs that came with the X2. After all we’re talkin Emulator sampling here, and you don’t joke that legacy away! :sunglasses:

#19

E4 Racks are bargain. Fantastic sound.
Depressing to see E-MU name going from Emulator II to a couple of headphones.

#20

… and there was also some awful disk-based copy protection involved (Safecast?) Not only do you need to have the card (mine was a 1212M), you also need a PCI slot; and there are no x64 Windows drivers.

Extreme Sample Converter is working fine here on Windows 10 Pro x64 20H2.

I don’t think it’s worth trying to convert the X2/3 libraries (and possibly not legal), but in my case it was about my own samples and transferring them across to Kontakt, and then to HALion. In some cases I no longer had the hardware I used to create the sample patches, in other cases it was about saving work, and ESC did that quite well.

As an aside, the “VSTi Converter” feature in ESC can also be done with HALion 6, i.e. automate the sampling of other instruments, which in Emulator X2/3 was called “SynthSwipe” – just that E-MU were doing it in 2007!