Chicken Systems products (Translator, Constructor, Instrument Manager) all support the READING and WRITING and FORMATTING of Akai, Emu, Roland, Ensoniq, and MPC proprietary disks. You can add program, samples, banks, folders, and on and on. You can delete objects, files. In other words, you have absolutely full control of these disks the same way you have full control of regular computer disks.
This also includes images which you can burn to CD using any type of CD-burning software.
The old hardware samplers never properly supported direct sample or program transfer to their memory via MIDI or SCSI. There are exceptions, but far and few between.
Given the ability for the above programs to completely bypass these issues, and since once you transfer stuff to the samplers you have to save the sounds/programs/banks anyway, these programs provide a modern, fast, and powerful way to transfer any type of sound or program to your beloved older hardware sampler.
SMDI or any type of direct transfer may seem sexy and obvious, but the disk-based process is much more reliable, cheaper, quicker, obsolescence-proof, and way more powerful then simply flying a single samle or whatever over to your sampler. Instead construct the whole she-bang on your computer, where the REAL power lies, then write it to disk, and load it onto your sampler.
In my mind, with over 25 years of working with hardware samplers, it's an absolute no-brainer.
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