Loyal Sweetwater customer, Tom Capek, sends us this outline of a tough problem he solved with zone crossfades on his Akai S5000 sampler. We think some of you S5000/6000 owners might benefit from his work so we're including it here.

On the Akai formatted SR "Interactive Drums" CD-ROM- Partition A-"ID KITS A"-the "ID TOMS1 DW" program- Keygroup#2-All the zones are mistakenly assigned to "TCTOM 1 #2 -L".

Also-please note that in any programs having keygroups using 4 mono samples panned as 2 stereo pairs instead of 2 true stereo samples in "zone crossfades" do not work correctly. The stereo samples pan suddenly to one side at the velocity overlap point, due to the fact that the S5000 running any OS version later than 1.30 only grabs one side of the stereo sample when attempting to implement the zone crossfade. (The latest O/S is 2.12)

The simplest solution is to turn the zone crossfades off, but then sample transitions are not as smooth. The best solution is to simply create true stereo samples by using "convert -L/-R" function. (Press the "sample" button and then "sample tools".)

If you do the conversion by grabbing only the left sample the resulting stereo samples will be properly assigned, and panned properly in the keygroups automatically.

It would be a good idea for anyone working with an AKAI 5000 or 6000 to convert all "dual mono" samples to stereo when working with zone crossfades.