Today's tip pays homage to cryptic error messages (believe it or not Microsoft and Apple don't have the monopoly on them).

"I've been trying to load some new sounds into my Kurzweil, but they are either defective or my machine isn't working right. I keep getting this alert message that says something like, 'This file contains samples. Load anyway?' I tell it to load anyway, but they don't play right. What could be wrong?"

The Kurzweil is sort of a hybrid sampler and synthesizer. Many of its sounds utilize the onboard ROM wave data, and only use program RAM to store parameters for how to utilize the wave data in ROM. But it is also a sampler, meaning you can install sample RAM (which is separate from the program RAM, or PRAM) and load new sound wave data into the machine.

The only time a Kurzweil will say "there are samples, but load anyway?" is when you are trying to load sounds that require sample data to load and you do not have available sample RAM for it to load into. Basically the machine is asking if you want to go ahead and load the program data that uses those samples even though it can't load the samples.

It is likely that you have no sample RAM or your RAM is working incorrectly for some reason. Running out of RAM by having too much stuff already loaded presents you with a different (and more clear) error message specific to that. It is also possible that the files on the disk(s) have become corrupt in some way, but I would think if they are all doing the same thing your problem is need of working RAM in the machine.

(By the way, we don't mean to pick on Kurzweil here in regard to cryptic error messages. This is the exception; for the most part theirs are better than most.)