Trouble converting old sample CDs in Kontakt and CDXtract

[Metrophage]

But I've got it sorted now! I am only recounting it here to help others.

I have not usually been very much into sampling. But recently I found myself playing with Kontakt a bit. And simultaneously happened to find a stack of ancient SampleCell CDs which were lost here. So I figured I'd try converting the discs and check out the contents. Kontakt supposedly converts SamplCell, but it usually just crashed. I figured that being a dedicated converter, CDXtract would fare a bit better - and it did - but it still crashed with some discs as well. I broke out a few Akai CDs and these were much, much easier.

The problem I was having was that some SampleCell CDs have samples in SoundDesigner I (one) format. Kontakt simply bombs when it finds these. CDXtract was bombing on me at first because a CD had the wrong paths for its SC instruments (A Poke in the Ear, was meant to have the instrument files on floppy while the samples were on CD) Once I fixed the paths (manually, in SoftSampleCell editor...) CDXtract wouldn't crash, but it was still not finding the samples, despite samples with those names being in the search path. They were all SD1 files. And even of those, editors I tried would convert some, but not others.

The only one which worked for all of them was SoundApp PPC.

So... short story is - if you are trying to convert SampleCell (or maybe also other old formats) libraries, check for unsupported audio types which might need to be converted first.