FA-06 Expansion Slots

[Mad_Maestro]

Well I hate downloading stuff on the computer, but I finally downloaded some sounds from the Axial site. I've loaded two sound packs already but I'm curious how many sound packs can be loaded in the FA-06 at a time. I already stored two packs in slot 1. My question is after reading the documentation is can you only store two sound packs per a slot so max of 4 or can you add sounds to slot one and two up to sixteen in each because that is how many pads I have.

 

Thanks for the input. The documentation I've read at least 5 times and I'm still not sure of the answer.

[EscapeRocks]

you can only have 2 EXP's loaded in your FA at any time.

 

For example I have EXP 2 and 6 loaded in my FA-08 at this time.

 

I would double check your FA. You can't load more than 1 EXP into a slot.

 

 

The FA06/08 have two slots for EXP.

 

If you're on Facebook hit up the Roland FA group. Lots of good info there..

Click this here to go there

 

 

 

[vonnor]

If you happened to load them one at a time, possibly the 2nd 'pack' overwrote the 1st in the same virtual EXP slot.

 

~ vonnor

[Morizzle]

If you press the menu button, select "System" and go all the way to the right it'll show what EX-Sets you have currently installed (+the OS version).

[Krakit]

This information seems relevant. Forgive me if it's not. I just got off the phone with Roland tech support. I learned that even if you copy the sounds from the EXP files to USER banks on the FA keyboards that they do not remain if you change the EXP files at a later date. That is to say if you pick the three electric piano sounds you like most from and EXP, save them to the internal memory and then dump that EXP to get more sounds added, the electric piano sounds won't work. All the EXPs use wav files that need to be present in the virtual expansion slots for any tweaked and saved sounds to still function. Needless to say this disappointed me no end. You would think that having a 32 gig SD card and a 16 gig flash drive in the box would afford me the room needed to store such things as wav files needed for sounds. But no.

 

So if you're like me you are keeping all the EXP files on a dedicated flash drive and memorizing the routine for loaded them into your board when needed. It takes around 6 minutes to load new ones so keep that in mind. For the record it's done by powering up while holding the "Preview" button and then choosing the EXPs that you want for slots 1 and 2 after that.

 

On yet another note, you use the touch sensitive pads to choose which of the currently 10 EXPs available. There are only 16 pads all told on the board. So I asked what happens if Roland decides to add a 17th EXP set. I was told there isn't really any intention of going past the ten currently available EXP sets, but if they ever do make it to 17 Roland will devise a way to work around the limitation of the pads.

 

Also if you think you can rename the bin files to make it easier to choose when booting up (the defaults are EXP01.bin through EXP10.bin so far) that won't work either. Needs to stay EXP01.bin EXP02.bin etc.

 

Hope I saved someone some trouble on this one.

 

Carl

[AnotherScott]

You would think that having a 32 gig SD card and a 16 gig flash drive in the box would afford me the room needed to store such things as wav files needed for sounds. But no.

...because the SD card and flash are storage (i.e. seen as a hard drive), and the wavs need to be in resident in memory (i.e. in something seen as RAM or ROM). Just like on a computer, adding an additional or larger drive won't solve a problem that is caused by not having enough memory/RAM.

[Krakit]

Computer hard drives can provide supplemental computer memory.

 

It's called "virtual memory".

 

Carl

[Jazzmammal]

True Carl but the HD is way slower than accessing data in RAM unless you're using an SSD but even then I don't know how that would work in software. I don't think any of our music keyboards use virtual memory like a PC does.

 

Bob

[AnotherScott]

Right. Virtual memory requires processor and OS capabilities that likely exceed anything in a current keyboard (except the Kronos, which is based on a traditional computer motherboard and Linux foundation); and even then, virtual memory doesn't completely obviate the need for having sufficient "real" memory for many tasks.