AKAI S5000/6000 under Windows 10

I personally own an 'old' S5000 sampler. It is still a very good machine from a sound and functional point of view. It is not because this machine is twenty years old that it is obsolete. The only slightly negative point is that the use of such a machine via the control panel is not particularly very convenient. Reason why AKAI also released the S6000 with detachable front panel:

https://www.soundonsound.com/reviews/akai-s6000-s5000

For this reason, AKAI had also published a software allowing the reproduction of the front panel of the S5000 / 6000 series directly on a PC, thanks to the optional USB interface:

eBay ($235 November 05, 2021)

This software was AKsys. It offered the possibility of controlling the entire control panel through its graphical interface :

Great. Today, the problem is that neither this software nor the driver for the 'S' series samplers are compatible with Windows 10. So is all lost? Of course not!

A French enthusiast, Guillaume Jouffroy, has developed a driver and an application offering the same characteristics as AKsys, S56sys:

This graphical interface allows you to view the contents of the S5000 / 6000 screen live and also of course to directly control the machine as here, example the loading of samples form the internal disk:

A small problem with the software here, the lack of refresh once the operation is complete. We imagine then that s56sys is crashed. This is not the case, pressing one of the eight function buttons refreshes the screen. OK, that's not a problem!

Another problem exists. In the right pane, the sample memory content is not updated either. The solution is simply to quit the application and relaunch it immediately. You don't lose anything since everything happens in the sampler. The solution is just not... very elegant. After that, the memory content of the S5000 is displayed well :

And you can transfer the sample of your choice from the S5000 / 6000 to the directory of your choice on your PC. The transfer from the PC to the sampler is done in the same way.

Warning: the destination directory on your PC must have extended rights. The copy will remain blocked if it is necessary to have administrator rights:

Please note that the transfer is carried out under the USB1 protocol with a theoretical speed of less than 150 KB per second. It's relatively slow ... but it offers a simple and inexpensive way to transfer your samples to the PC for editing or even storage if you don't have specific units on your sampler.

In short, you can perform almost all the tasks of this sampler directly from your PC. After a few hours of use, I can say that this app is very handy.

Another example, the management of the MIDI interface:

And so on...

The license currently costs € 9 (November 05, 2021). How to say: it is almost free!

Given the services provided by this software, there is absolutely no hesitation in acquiring a license!