Zoom Sampletrak ST-224 - ZMF Producer

via Plutonik9:
"Hi, I'm not sure if this is useful for your blog, but I found (very randomly) something that Zoom Sampletrak ST-224 owners may find quite useful & fascinating. Put simply, it's an unreleased (lost) piece of software called 'ZMF Producer' (I've never seen it mentioned anywhere ever) from Zoom corp. which allows (though a GUI) creation/editing of .zmf banks via computer! It's hard to understate the importance of this piece of software because it allows ST-224 users to do things that have NEVER (ever) been possible;

-Create custom .zmf banks though software (win95/98/2000/xp) GUI. Allows importing of AIFF & Wave Files and drag & drop assignment to 24 pads.
-Graphical control of start/stop & offset points of samples via a waveform display window
-Exporting (extracting) of wave files from .zmf bank files (Previously impossible without re-recording the analogue outputs).
-(Almost) full control over sample parameters in software (tune, trigger mode, panning, reverse & effect on/off & start/end/offset sample position markers). *Only lacking midi note number assignment to the pads, this'll still need to be done from the unit itself.
-Importing/Exporting .smf song files (not editing unfortunately).

Up until this piece of software was discovered, all these things had tobe manually (and tediously) set from the ST-224 front panel. Wave &Aiff import was possible, but required so much work that it wasn'treally practical. The only additional piece of hardware required for it's use is a smartmedia reader (I've got a SanDisk USB one) to dump the .zmf files from your computer for loading into the unit.

The version number of the software says 'Version 0.0.13.4' copyright 1999 (sounds extremely beta). No reference to this software is on Zoom/Samson's site or in the manual & a Google search for "ZMF Producer" yields no result.

Anyways the Sampletrak has been discontinued for probably 10 years, what a surprise to stumble across this randomly all these years later. Makes you wonder what sought of attention this 'poor man's MPC' would have gotten had this been made available to the public?
Truly a mystery for the ages!

I've started a Yahoogroup for Sampletrak users and added this program (plus some shareable .zmf banks) to the files section @ http://launch.groups.yahoo.com/group/Sampletrak/"

"It occurred to me that this was perhaps what Zoom used internally (by development team) to create the demo bank (Jungle Man?) that is hard coded into the ROM (can be retrieved with factory reset). Hence, why it was created....and perhaps why it never was taken any further or released to the public?"