Emulator X3 - a forgotten gem
E-mu the company - Emulator the sampler
No need to cover the background and history behind E-mu but I will quote this anecdote:
Dave Rossum and Scott Wedge were the founders of E-mu and by 1980 they had a prototype Emulator 1 but still didn't have a name for it other than the sampler. So one day Rossum asked everyone to go home and come back the next day with some ideas. Ed Rudnick came in the next day with a big smile on his face and announced that he had found the name Emulator. He had found it after looking through the thesaurus. Considering the match with the company name it was amazing and Wedge said a lot of people thought the name of the company was Emulator.
Links
The Emulator Archive was founded in July 1999 to preserve the legacy of music technology created by E-mu Systems. The Emulator Archive has comprehensive information on all vintage E-mu Systems products to enable owners to continue to enjoy the amazing technology, and to create new music magic from these innovative instruments. The archive has not been amended with new content since 2002. While the initial conversion was text based, we do plan on eventually adding the pictures.
Other sites of interest
Getting Started
You can download the official Emulator X from the Internet Archive but the authorisation server is no longer available. So you will get nagged about registration and Emulator X may not work after a while - 30 days?
There is a version by R2R that removes the registration and also fixes FX issues. I won't provide a link because R2R are known for Warez but it's out there and the software is now 'abandonware' so I personally don't have any moral issues with this.
I installed both 64/32bit but I had a few issues so I would recommend just installing the 64bit version. Another issue I has was with the libraries that come with Emulator X and part of Creative's Sound Central system. If the library has an installer use and don't change the default directory. I tried to be clever and installed them in my own folders but when I loaded the bank it couldn't find the samples.
This is what my Creative Sound Central folder has:
Hint*
Do not use the Library indexing function if you have a lot of libraries. E-mu users will have had much smaller storage in those days so just use the System tab to navigate to your banks. It did actually work better with the 32bit version but it is very slow.
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