How to Burn
an Emu-format Sample
CD Rom  on a PC

TweakHeadz Emu CD Roms

Emu Format Sample CD-Rom  The Mystik Garage  

My Classic Emu Sample CD-Rom Ice Kold Tekno

Need a small scsi hard disk drive?  Yep, i got all the answers for you guys!  Jim Puckett is a member of the Emusaic list and sells, yep, you got it, small scsi drives out of his basement.  Email him and find out what he's got.  I  got an IBM 540 meg scsi from him at a very reasonable price.  So support a fellow Emusaic member!  Email Jim Puckett

There's a store that features older, really cheap scsi drives and lots of other stuff that could work with your emu sampler

2. A removable or fixed disk connected to the Scsi chain that can save banks from the Emu sampler and be accessible to the host computer. A Zip drive works well enough though you may get an underrun from time to time. Most small scsi hard disks are excellent for the task.  Note: It is important that the disk capacity not exceed 650 megabytes (700, if your cdrw can handle these newer disks). While it is possible to use larger drives, make sure they are defragmented before the burn as the CDR will only see the 1st 650 megs. For tips from the emulator list on defragging, click here. A 300 to 500 meg fixed Hard drive is ideal. It is also good (though not required) to have an additional SCSI CD Rom player that is connected to both the PC and the Sampler on the SCSI chain. This allows you to "test" your CDs for compatibility, and it saves wear and tear on the CDR machine.

3. The proper software that will allow you to write an image file of the scsi drive to the CDR drive and to one of your PC IDE disks. I use and recommend the set of utilities called DAO which is freeware and is available at http://www.goldenhawk.com.

Look for the download package called the MS-DOS 32 bit console This package includes the following DOS files.

1. Disk2CD This program reads the data on your Emu drive and copies it exactly to a CDRW or CDR disc.

2. CD2File This program reads the CDR you just burned and makes an image file of it on drive in your computer that you specify

3. File2CD This program writes from the Image file to a CDR disc.

Mac Users:  Many Mac Users on the Emusaic List tell me that Toast Pro is the program to get to make and burn EMU image files. 

View the l ist of supported cdr/w machines

Setting up the DAO Utilities:

While you should always read the docs carefully,  it is possible to set up your scsi system to make this very easy. Here's a tip I learned from trial and error. Pay attention now, I am about to save you tons of work! The programs appear to look for the lowest number scsi id as a default. If you have, for example, 3 Emu hard/removable drives on the chain, it will try to burn from the lowest ID in the chain. First the program looks for your CDR and if it finds it, it will then look for a drive to write from. It will choose the 1st on it finds.

ID#0 IBM 4.3 gig scsi hard drive

ID#1 Yamaha CRW2100SZ (the burning machine)

ID#2 Emulator E5000

ID#3 ESi 32

ID#4 NEC generic 8x CDROM player (for simply loading sample cds to either sampler)

ID#5 IBM 540 (the image of this drive is burned to CDRW)

ID#6 Zip drive

ID#7 Adaptec 2906

If I put the IBM 540 at ID#0 Disk2CD will always find it as the source drive.  Since I do not have it at ID 5 I have to write a dos BAT file to it looks there first.  (see point 2 below)

The Process

1. Save your banks you want on CDR to the E-Mu formatted drive. Remember that your CDR directory will look exactly the same, so put them in the order you want the banks, with bank names you will remember.

2. Run Disk2CD and copy the image of the Emu Drive to CDR(W). You'll see a DOS window open up on your screen.  It will show you the drive it found to burn to and burn from, and  will tell you the size of the drive image and estimate approximately how long the burn will take. This is the critical burn, the slowest, and the one most prone to errors. So, you want to leave your PC undisturbed during it. If you use a CDRW you will avoid making coasters.  You can watch the "percent copied" tick away in the window till it reaches 100%.  After you reach 100%, the program will automatically write a "postgap" to the disk and will finalize, i.e., close, the disk.  You will see "CD Successfully recorded!" at the end.

Its not uncommon to have errors.  If there are any gremlins in your scsi system with bad drivers, ID mismatch, ill-seated cables, improper termination, they can easily cause Disk2CD to fail.  If you neglect to turn off "auto insert notification" on ALL your cd rom drives (including IDE cd rom drives) you may have problems.  Also, if your source disk is badly fragmented or very slow (like most zip drives) you may get a buffer under run which will kill the process. To fix a fragmented drive, save the files on some other media, reformat the disk, then copy the files back.  And lastly, if you didn't heed my advice and tried reading your email or surfing the web during the burn, well, you should have listened. Disk2CD is not a program that multi-tasks well.  You can't run it in the background while you do other stuff.  This is good old DOS, friends!  But with a well configured system, the program is robust and rarely if ever causes a problem on its own.

3. Test the CDRW by loading banks back into the Sampler. You should see all the banks that were on your original drive in the directory.

If you are only making one disk your done!  If you want to store an .IMG file backup of the drive on your computer's hard drive, or if you want a file from which you can make multiple copies, for instance if you are selling your work, read on. 

4. Next run CD2File, which will copy the CDRW image to a standard PC file. The disk image file size depends on the size of the drive. So, even if you only have 2 megs of data on the hard disk, the IMG file will be the size of the disk, not the data.  So load it up before you burn. If you are going to make multiple copies of your disc, you will want to keep this file on your drive and burn from it, and not the original source disk.

5. Run File2CD, which will burn the file onto CDR. You can do this as many times as you like. It burns CDRs much faster and more reliably than Disk2CD

6. Test the final CDR on a different CD Drive if possible.

Make a nice cover and enjoy your home brewed Emu-format Sample CD Rom!

More Tips and Warnings

1. If you have more than one host adapter:  In multiple host adapter systems it is possible that Disk2CD will find the wrong host adapter in which case you need to write a short dos batch (.BAT) file to tell it where to look for the source drive. Read all the docs to figure that out.  If you have an ATA100 controller card on your PCI bus, this is often interpreted as a SCSI host adapter.  The .BAT file is a .TXT file that contains a DOS command line that is "run" when you double-click it.  Here's the contents of a BAT file

A:\DAO32\DISK2CD/ SOURCE=1:2:0

This will switch the host adapter from #0 to #1 and will find the source drive at SCSI ID#2 LUN #0.  Substitute your own drive path.  <drive path><program name>/source=<HA:ID:LUN>  Fun, huh?

2. Do not format, scan, or optimize the Emu dedicated drives from the PC. Use the sampler to install the E-mu operating system on them. The PC will recognize the drive and will ask you if you want to format it if you click its icon. Always answer no, and remove any icons to the drives from your desktop. Do not install any drivers for these Emu-controlled devices. It is fine if the PC finds them during hardware polling on boot up and installs an entry and drive letter under System Properties. Just leave them alone.  Do not use any ZIP or scsi utilities on emu-formatted media.  You might trash the boot sector and make the disk readable to PCs, unreadable to your sampler. 

3. Never reboot or boot your PC while there is a disk operation going on with the sampler and its drives. The PC will steal the SCSI bus momentarily during the hardware polling process and you may lose your data and possibly corrupt your drive. Always turn on your sampler before your PC. It is OK to turn on the SCSI drives after the PC boots as long as you are only accessing them from the sampler. However, if you are going to burn an image from the Emu disk, the PC must know that the drive is there and powered on. So, it is best to turn on all the devices on your scsi chain, then boot the PC before you attempt to burn a disk image to CDR.

4. Leave your PC alone while it is burning CDRs. Make sure that screensavers, scan disk, or any automated and timed processes are disabled before the burn. It is wise to reboot the computer before a burn to make sure the OS has not accumulated resource conflicts or other errors. Make sure nothing disrupts the SCSI flow during the 1st burn. Make sure "auto insert notification" on all your scsi and ide cd rom players/recorders is turned off in the Windows control panel under System Properties->Device manager->CD ROM->Properties-> Settings This 'feature' of windows, which constantly checks your cd rom players to see if you just inserted an audio cd to play, wreaks utter havoc on scsi systems with samplers on the chain. Some audio programs will set this to "on" when you install them, so if things stop working with the sampler, this is the 1st place to check. While you are there, make sure that DISCONNECT is checked and SYNC DATA Transfer is also checked.  Now we are having fun, eh?

Best of Luck in your Music Making!

Rich the TweakMeister