Emu XL-7 & MP-7 User's Group

I'd buy more in a blink, if they were a) available & b) reasonably priced (e.g. in the order of $200 for a 32MB; I realise that this is always going to be a short-order item). 
I wish the firmware supported bigger memory too.

I have tried to buy more but the one outlet that claims to have stock is not responding.

my experiences (& YMMV):-

I currently have three of the 32MB (from emu) & one 16MB (ebay).

also, the "XL" expansion I bought for my audity 2000 is a crippled version of this same ram card, in that it is the same hardware but is somehow write-protected. it won't work in a proteus box, but is fine in my ultras. go figure, as they say.

the flash roms are shared by a regular p2k rackmount, a virtuoso rackmount, a planet-earth rackmount, an XL-7 command station & a PK-6 keyboard.... so, not enough custom rom to go around all the proteus I have, but just about enough if I juggle them with the various factory roms aswell.

I use them primarily for samples of my m400 mellotron which, with it's nine tapeframes, is just too cumbersome for active gig life. I also have some found-sounds & home-made stuff in there.

it doesn't seem to be possible to copy samples or presets from a factory rom in an ultra, in order to create a "best-of" rom. if anyone's done this, I'd like to hear how! :-)  I haven't tried renaming the samples.....

biggest hassle is that juggling- how to keep track of patches I've made using the custom roms & the factory roms, if I keep moving them around. I have to do a lot of sys-ex dumps & even then, the naming & numbering convention of the roms & the soundsets is crucial & tricky.

(e.g. emu made at least two versions of the "composer" rom with different names but the same contents. they show up as different IDs.)

but the actual authoring process is quite sweet (once you get it working- I have an ultra 5000 that won't do it, no matter what, & an ultra 6400 that has no problems at all. luckily, these machines are quite cheap now....) 

you will have to keep tweaking the bank size; even if it says it's 32MB, the odd few bytes over this won't show up on the sampler's display, & will stop it fitting on the rom. a finished bank is made up of samples & sampler patches; the authoring process (which takes about ten minutes) creates a proteus instrument which retains the sampler's stereo placement, keyboard mapping & so forth.

the advantages that should be immediately obvious are that the samples are available instantly when the machine boots, you don't have to load from hard-drive (& if you use the rom in a proteus box, you don't have a fragile hard drive to worry about), & you have a better (IMHO) synth engine with which to process them. 

I used to do the same sort of thing with alesis' soundbridge & quadrasynths; the emu version is a dream compared to that nightmare! 

the nearest contemporary equivalent to this functionality is the waldorf blofeld with the sample option (keyboard or desktop). this lets you have 60MB of custom sounds on-board a pretty powerful synth engine, but the o/s is somewhat flakey at the time of writing, & the hardware options (audio outs & so on) are way weaker than the proteus. my blohard sounds amazing, but locks up all the time. the proteus is still the one for me.

duncan/radio massacre international