Preparing Samples for the Akai S1000

SampleStack gets your audio into a form the S1000 will accept, then a disk-image tool does the transfer. This page covers both halves, so you know exactly where SampleStack stops.

What SampleStack Does

An S1000 collection in SampleStack is a preparation folder. It converts your samples to 44.1 kHz or 22.05 kHz at 16-bit, and it checks every file name against the rules the Akai filesystem actually enforces. It does not write disk images and cannot copy anything onto the sampler.

That division is deliberate. Name and format problems are the ones that waste an afternoon — they surface only after you've built an image and carried it over to the sampler. SampleStack catches them first.

Why Not Just a Card?

The S1000 has no FAT support at all. It reads Akai's own filesystem from a floppy disk or a SCSI drive, so there is no arrangement of folders and WAV files it can understand. Modern floppy and SCSI emulators don't change that: the SD card in a Gotek or a BlueSCSI holds disk images, and Akai's filesystem lives inside the image. Something has to build that image, and that something is the tool in step 2.

Step 1: Prepare the Samples

1. Add a collection and set its type to S1000.
2. Drag in the samples you want, or copy them from a sample library.
3. Convert anything SampleStack flags. Samples at 48 kHz or 24-bit need converting; 44.1 kHz and 22.05 kHz both pass as they are.
4. Fix any names it flags — see the naming rules below.

When the collection shows no remaining problems, the folder on disk is ready for the next step.

Step 2: Build a Disk Image

Two tools are commonly used:

• akaiutil — open source, with a macOS build, and a command-line tool. It reads and writes Akai filesystems for the S900 through S3200XL, formats new images, and converts between WAV files and Akai sample files. Point it at your prepared folder and it does the conversion and the import.
• Chicken Systems Translator — commercial, with a graphical interface, if you'd rather not work in a terminal.

Which kind of image you want depends on your hardware: a floppy image for a Gotek or HxC emulator, or a hard-disk image for a SCSI emulator such as BlueSCSI or ZuluSCSI. The tools above can produce either.

Step 3: Load on the Sampler

Copy the finished image to your emulator's SD card, select it on the emulator, and load it from the S1000's disk pages as you would any Akai disk. Your samples then live in the sampler's memory, and you can build keygroups from them as usual.

The Naming Rules

This is the part that catches people. The S1000 filesystem allows:

• 12 characters at most
• Upper case only
• Only these characters: A–Z, 0–9, space, #, +, - and .

So PIANO C3.wav and BASS#1.wav are fine, while Piano_C3.wav fails on three counts at once: lower case, an underscore, and nothing to warn you until the transfer. SampleStack flags each of these in the collection.

Stereo Samples

The S1000 keeps a stereo sample as two mono files whose names end in -L and -R — so STRINGS-L and STRINGS-R make one stereo sound. SampleStack doesn't split stereo files for you, so stereo passes validation and your transfer tool handles the split. If you name the pairs yourself, SampleStack tells you when one half is missing, which is otherwise a silent failure on the sampler.

Sample Rates

The S1000 records at 44.1 kHz (full bandwidth) or 22.05 kHz (half bandwidth), and both are accepted as they are. Software V2.0 can also resample existing material to two thirds or three quarters of its rate, giving 29.4 kHz and 33.075 kHz — but those are rates the sampler produces itself, not ones you can bring in, so SampleStack converts them to 44.1 kHz.