[sdiy] Sampler with tape dump?

[brianw]

I seriously doubt it. The dump to tape would take so long that it would probably have a 100% chance of error. The size of a synth patch versus the size of a sample is quite a significant difference.

There are samplers with MIDI System Exclusive messages for dumping samples, and there's a Sample Dump Standard that came after many samplers has rolled their own protocols. You probably already know this. Even MIDI is a slow communications protocol for sample data transfer, and I can't imagine how slow it would be for tape.

I was going to guess that the first commercial sampler came after MIDI was invented, but the internet tells me that Harry Mendell's Computer Music Melodian came out in 1976. There's no mention of how that might have dumped samples, but it was built on a PDP-8 computer, so I suppose there was backup to that kind of rack mounted computer tape drive (certainly not a hand-held cassette).

One article says that "old" samplers used SCSI, but I think that SCSI was too expensive for many samplers, so they used floppy storage mainly. SCSI was first available in 1981, so any samplers older than that would not have used SCSI.

Brian


On Aug 7, 2024, at 2:19 PM, Mattias Rickardsson <mr at analogue.org> wrote:
> Hi,
> After some cassette backup discussions, a silly idea came up.
> 
> Old synths often had tape dump as a means of backing up sounds.
> Nowadays it's easier to use a sampler or computer than a cassette tape, since it's just audio.
> Sooo... turning this on its head:
> 
> Were there ever any old sampler that would let you store sample data as a tape dump? (-:
> 
> /mr