Ddrum 3 scsi board digital in noise

[John]

Sampling with the ddrum3 when using the spdif input is a nightmare. The ddrum will compress the sound on input and all the tail ends of whatever your trying to sample are filled with compressed white noise. Is there any way around this unwanted compression?

                                                                                Thanks in advance.

[Deleted]

I've not had the issues you describe. Just make sure the sample transferred is some dB below 0dBFS, but not a lot. The dd3 normalizes all samples, so if the sample is transferred at very low level, it will be amplified digitally and I would imagine some noise will be the result. Also make sure threshold and recording length is appropriate for the sample in question, you don't want to record longer than the sample length.

Hope this helps!
/Krillo

[John]

Thanks for responding. The normalization is the problem for me. I just wish you could switch that off.

[Deleted]

Please note that the dd3 actually has a dynamics compressor, see page 66 in the manual. If this is not what causes your issue, please describe your audio setup, and also how you create your samples. Maybe there's a problem there.

Without knowing details, make sure that your audio source is low-noise. The samples I create end up with ~85dB of S/N with fairly inexpensive gear. Same thing with the recording of the samples (assuming you record them on your computer first) - keep them as close to 0dBFS as possible.

[John]

It’s not my gear. I can take any 2box DSND, split the sound file into individual samples, trigger them in Logic Pro X, spdif out of my Presonus Quantum to ddrum3 spdif in, and the tail of any sound be sampled into the ddrum3 will be ruined by the compression. Midi Sample Dump would alleviate the problem, but it’s painfully slow.

It seems like the best method of getting clean sounds into the ddrum3 is to use Chicken Systems translator and ScSI2CD as mentioned in another thread. If anyone is using this method, I’d like to hear the results.
Also, the SCSI dump program provided by Ddrum stopped functioning after System 7.1 on the Mac. If anyone has a version that would work on something as old as a Mac G3, that would be awesome. The last time I got the program to work was on Mac Centris 650. That was a long time ago.

[kenjwright]

Mar 3, 2023 17:59:17 GMT -5 John said:

It seems like the best method of getting clean sounds into the ddrum3 is to use Chicken Systems translator and ScSI2CD as mentioned in another thread. If anyone is using this method, I’d like to hear the results.

Hi John,

The Chicken Systems translator works great for converting to the Akai S-1000 format. I purchased the SCSI2SD adaptor which also works great emulating an S1000 disk or CD, however I would suggest getting the ZuluSCSI Mini v1.0 SCSI SD Drive instead as it uses fat32 formatted SD cards and supports 7 SCSI IDs whereas the SCSI2SD only supports 4. I also suggest getting a SCSI extension cable (flat ribbon IDC) otherwise you have a bulky adapter hanging off of the dd3 as it will require a 50pin Centronics to DB25 adapter as well.

One other thing to note, the Chicken software will convert your wav/aiff files to S1000, but cannot work any magic with the dd3 native multi-layers files. That still requires the old Mac method using the SCSI Utility. The dd3 native files, whether multi or single layer all contain a layer header in front of the wave data so MIDI sample dump standard does not work with the native files either as the header will be interpreted as wav data and result in noise at the start of the sample.

Cheers!

Ken

[John]

Thanks for the info Ken! Much appreciated. As long as I can get individual sounds into the ddrum3, I can assemble the multilayer files internally. One thing I just remembered. The last time, and this was many years ago, I fired up the SCSI dump utility on a Mac g3, it was able to see the entire card, but you couldn’t drill down and see the individual multi wave files.

Thanks again,

John

[kenjwright]

If you go for the Chicken Systems software, here are a couple of tips for where I stumbled initially;

• Under Preferences->General; make sure that "Show Proprietary Devices" is checked.
• Under Preferences->SCSI2SD Partition Map; make sure to enter the sector mapping that matches the document provided with the device.

Without those two configurations set the partitions on the pre-formatted SD card will not show up (under Proprietary Devices).

Cheers!

Ken